  In this paper we present results and analyses of a class of games in which
heterogeneous agents are rewarded for being in a minority group. Each agent
possesses a number of fixed strategies each of which are predictors of the next
minority group. The strategies use a set of aggregate, publicly available
information (reflecting the agents' collective previous decisions) to make
their predictions. An agent chooses which group to join at a given moment by
using one of his strategies. These games are adaptive in that agents can
choose, at different points of the game, to exercise different strategies in
making their choice of which group to join. We find, rather generally, that
such systems evidence a phase change from a maladaptive, informationally
efficient phase in which the system performs poorly at generating resources, to
an inefficient phase in which there is an emergent cooperation among the
agents, and the system more effectively generates resources. The best emergent
coordination is achieved in a transition region between these two phases. This
transition occurs when the dimension of the strategy space is of the order of
the number of agents playing the game. We present explanations for this general
behavior, based in part on an information theoretic analysis of the system and
its publicly available information. We also propose a mean-field like model of
the game which is most accurate in the maladaptive, efficient phase. In
addition, we show that the best individual agent performance in the two
different phases is achieved by sets of strategies with markedly different
characteristics. We discuss implications of our results for various aspects of
the study of complex adaptive systems.

Adaptation, Noise, and Self-Organizing Systems;Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems