Personal sustained cooperation based on networked evolutionary game theory

Natural gradient ascent in evolutionary games

We consider evolutionary games with a continuous trait space where the replicator dynamics are restricted to the manifold of multivariate Gaussian distributions. We demonstrate that replicator dynamics are gradient flows with respect to the Fisher information metric. The potential function for these gradient flows is closely related to the mean fitness. Our findings extend previous results on natural gradient ascent in evolutionary games with a finite strategy set. Throughout the paper we pursue an information-geometric point of view on evolutionary games. This sheds a new light on the replicator dynamics as a learning process, realizing the compromise between maximization of the mean fitness and preservation of the diversity.