ABSTRACT
In this chapter, through a series of work by Robert Axelrod on the repeated prisoner’s dilemma tournament and the later work by John Rust on the Santa Fe double auction tournament, we shall begin to trace the origin of two essential elements of agent-based computational economics: autonomous agents and the open coevolutionary game. As we shall see, these two elements are intertwined. In fact, the open coevolutionary game cannot be nontrivially formulated without the notion of autonomous agents or novelty-discovering agents.
