Craig Reynolds, the inventor of Boids, the revolutionary swarming algorithm, is studying the game of tag in relation to the emergence of complex strategies through play: “Tag is a children’s game based on symmetrical pursuit and evasion… A player’s (agent’s) fitness is determined by how well it performswhen placed in competition with several opponents chosen randomly from the coevolving population of players. In the beginning, the quality of play is very poor. Then slightly better strategies begin to exploit the weaknesses of others. Through evolution, guided by competitive fitness, increasingly better strategies emerge over time.”

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