Competitive environments like wild ecosystems and markets, where most of what constitutes the relevant environment for fitness is the behavior of other agents, are often described with the metaphor of the Red Queen’s Race — named after the character in Through the Looking Glass who says “here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
This metaphor is lossy because it does not sufficiently describe power asymmetry.
The accumulation of power asymmetry is at the core of what makes environments competitive in this way. Within a single iteration, we may easily justify this asymmetry: successful agents gain power because they have won it by succeeding; this power incentivizes them to try harder; they most successful are also the most worthy of this power because they are the most likely to do something useful with it. However, looking at a larger iterative game, we see a different pattern: power is a results-multiplier…
