Hamming distance as a measure of spatial chaos in evolutionary games.

From a context of evolutionary dynamics, social games can be studied as complex systems that may converge to a Nash equilibrium. Nonetheless, they can behave in an unpredictable manner when looking at the spatial patterns formed by the agents' strategies. This is known in the literature as spatial chaos. In this paper we analyze the problem for a deterministic prisoner's dilemma and a public goods game and calculate the Hamming distance that separates two solutions that start at very similar initial conditions for both cases. The rapid growth of this distance indicates the high sensitivity to initial conditions, which is a well-known indicator of chaotic dynamics.