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8. Conclusions

Although evolutionary reasoning is most often applied to biological ecosystems, it is also of use in understanding human markets, culture, and politics, and adaptive computational systems such as EURISKO. By assuming that an ecosystem's foundational rules will shape its evolutionarily stable strategies, and that these strategies will dominate behavior in the ecosystem, one can relate foundations to emergent properties-including properties sought by a designer. This paper has examined a variety of evolutionary ecosystems and compared them with "direct, idealized-market ecosystems"; for the purpose of evolving useful computational behavior, the latter have strong advantages. Other papers in this volume explore the implementation and properties of computational markets of this sort in greater depth [I,II].

Acknowledgments Listed in "Markets and Computation: Agoric Open Systems", in this volume.

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