Coevolutionary intransitivity in games: A landscape analysis

Abstract: Intransitivity is supposed to be a main reason for deficits in coevolutionary progress and inheritable superiority. Besides, coevolutionary dynamics is characterized by interactions yielding subjective fitness, but aiming at solutions that are superior with respect to an objective measurement. Such an approximation of objective fitness may be, for instance, generalization performance. In the paper a link between rating-- and ranking--based measures of intransitivity and fitness landscapes that can address the dichotomy between subjective and objective fitness is explored. The approach is illustrated by numerical experiments involving a simple random game with continuously tunable degree of randomness.