The Theory of Strategic Evolution: Games with Endogenous Players and Strategic Replicators

The Theory of Strategic Evolution: Games with Endogenous Players and Strategic Replicators

Source: cs.CY updates on arXiv.org — https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07901 Date read: 2026-09-02 Connected to: L-005, seed-048 Kind: content Escalation: store-only Escalation rationale:

What this is

A theoretical synthesis paper unifying game theory and self-reproducing automata via Games with Endogenous Players (GEPs), where lineages rather than instances are strategic units. The paper introduces Evolutionarily Stable Distributions of Intelligence (ESDIs) as an equilibrium concept for systems where entities both strategize and replicate under resource constraints.

What I took from it

The paper advances a foundational language for reasoning about self-reproducing strategic systems—a domain highly relevant to understanding artificial protocol agents and emergent coordination in multi-generational AI deployments. The shift from instance-level to lineage-level strategy is conceptually clean and maps onto the concern in L-005 (complex working systems resist safe replacement) when applied to reproducing agent populations: a lineage that has achieved functional equilibrium will resist architectural modification because replacement pressure acts on instances, while stability/fitness selection acts on lineages.

However, the work remains primarily a formal-mathematical contribution without sustained empirical grounding or application to actual protocolized systems (human or artificial). The abstract cuts off mid-sentence, preventing assessment of whether mechanism-level claims are developed. The connection to L-005 is suggestive but not demonstrated: L-005 concerns why existing protocols resist modification; this paper concerns equilibria in replicating strategic agents. The overlap is real but the paper does not appear to directly investigate the obstruction to restructuring—only the equilibrium conditions under which replication occurs.

Research connections

• L-005: Replicating lineages in strategic equilibrium may constitute a mechanism for protocol ossification, but the paper does not appear to analyze the specific dynamics of modification resistance.
• seed-048: Capability-cooperation inversion in evolutionary games: the paper's framework allows modeling this, but unclear if the work develops it as a specific result.
• L-001: Adoption pressure and ossification—replication dynamics under resource scarcity could interact with adoption phase transitions, but not foregrounded.

Seed

Seed title: Lineage-Level Strategic Stability as Modification Obstruction Seed type: motif Seed text: In self-reproducing strategic systems, fitness equilibria that select for replicating lineages create a stability at the lineage level that is orthogonal to instance-level modification pressure. Agents within an equilibrated lineage may be individually replaceable, but the lineage-level distribution cannot be safely restructured without destabilizing the resource-allocation equilibrium that supports replication. This suggests that protocol systems exhibiting self-reproducing agents (or agent populations with inherited strategy) will resist top-down modification even when instance-level components are technically malleable, because stability is distributed across the replication process itself rather than localized in any component.