Learning, competition and cooperation in simple games

The minority model was introduced to study the competition between agents w ith limited information. It has the remarkable feature that, as the number of strategies available to the agents increases; the collective gain made b y the agents is reduced. This crowd effect arises from the fact that only a minority carl profit at each moment, while all agents make their choices u sing the same input. We show that the properties of the model change drasti cally if the agents make choices based on their individual stories, keeping all remaining rules unaltered. This variation reduces the intrinsic frustr ation of the model, and improves the tendency towards cooperation and self organization. We finally study the stable mixing of individual and collecti ve behavior.