This game analogy seemed to be true of any adaptive system. In economics the payoff is in money, in politics the payoff is in votes, and on and on. At some level, all these adaptive systems are fundamentally the same. And that meant, in turn, that all of them are fundamentally like checkers or chess: the space of possibilities is vast beyond imagining. An agent can learn to play the game better—that's what adaptation is, after all. But it has just about as much chance of finding the optimum, stable equilibrium point of the game as you or I have of solving chess.
