The Game Theory of Life
Christos Papadimitriou, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, along with some collaborators, recently made an interesting connection between game theory and biological evolution. It was found that an established algorithm in game theory, the multiplicative weights update algorithm, could effectively describe genetic variations over generations.
The algorithm uses information from past experiences (or past games played) in order to help predict an optimal strategy. The article linked to below cites an example in which you have 10 financial advisors giving you advice on how to invest. Each day, you can choose to follow the advice of any one of the 10 advisors. In the beginning, you have no knowledge on the expertise of the advisors. The algorithm is used in this situation to raise the probability of selecting (on some given day) advisors who have given you good advice previously, and lowering the probability of choosing ones who gave bad recommendations.
In terms of evolution, the game can be thought of with genes being the players (investors in the above example) and alleles being the strategies the gene can choose from (the advisors). With each generation, a gene will increase the weight of alleles that help the population of organisms to thrive, and decrease the weight of alleles that do not help the population in order to come up with the best possible strategy for survival.
As with biology, the algorithm emphasizes diversity. A population of organisms is better off if it is more diverse since it is better able to adapt to new environments. The algorithm maintains diversity in the long run. Probabilities of worse strategies being chosen decrease, but are not eliminated completely. However, there is not a known mechanism for how diversity is maintained in biology, since one would think organisms with worse alleles being expressed would die out. Therefore, although the algorithm has been found to be a good model for evolution, the biological reasons for why it is such a good model are not yet known.
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/20/game-theory-life-qanta-magazine