Red Queen Effect

In computational AI, the Red Queen Effect describes a scenario where competing agents or systems must constantly improve their algorithms, models, or strategies merely to keep pace with their opponents or environmental changes. This concept is particularly relevant in evolutionary algorithms, adversarial learning, and game theory, where the progress of one agent forces the other to evolve rapidly to avoid falling behind. The metaphor comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where the Red Queen tells Alice that it takes all the running one can do to stay in the same place, symbolizing the relentless race for innovation in competitive domains like AI. For example, in adversarial AI, where one agent develops defenses and another creates attacks, both must continually evolve or risk obsolescence.
The term "Red Queen Effect" originated from evolutionary biology in the 1970s, and its application to AI and computational fields began in the 1990s, particularly as algorithms began to compete and co-evolve in complex systems. Its relevance grew with the rise of adversarial neural networks and co-evolutionary algorithms in the early 2000s.
The concept is named after the Red Queen character from Lewis Carroll’s book, but its application in evolutionary biology was popularized by Leigh Van Valen in 1973. In AI, researchers in evolutionary computation, such as John Holland and Kenneth De Jong, helped extend the concept to adaptive algorithms and competitive co-evolution in the late 20th century.