Games vs Nature: from Cancer to Endless Evolution

The mathematics of game theory and theoretical computer science can be extended to create new theories of biological & cultural evolution in cancer, metascience & other domains. I want to provide two examples of how viewing evolution as a game between the population and the environment is useful for both experiment and theory. For an experimental example, I will introduce you to the game assay: a way to use the game theoretic principle of revealed preferences to measure the ecological interactions of evolving populations. For a theoretical example, I will examine how the combinatorial structure of some static fitness landscapes can produce a computational constraint that prevents evolution from finding any local fitness optima, allowing for open-ended evolution. This state of perpetual disequilibrium can be used to drive positive results like the maintenance of costly learning and cooperation. It also opens new mathematical questions on the parameterized complexity of local search.