  The predominant paradigm in evolutionary game theory and more generally
online learning in games is based on a clear distinction between a population
of dynamic agents that interact given a fixed, static game. In this paper, we
move away from the artificial divide between dynamic agents and static games,
to introduce and analyze a large class of competitive settings where both the
agents and the games they play evolve strategically over time. We focus on
arguably the most archetypal game-theoretic setting -- zero-sum games (as well
as network generalizations) -- and the most studied evolutionary learning
dynamic -- replicator, the continuous-time analogue of multiplicative weights.
Populations of agents compete against each other in a zero-sum competition that
itself evolves adversarially to the current population mixture. Remarkably,
despite the chaotic coevolution of agents and games, we prove that the system
exhibits a number of regularities. First, the system has conservation laws of
an information-theoretic flavor that couple the behavior of all agents and
games. Secondly, the system is Poincar\'{e} recurrent, with effectively all
possible initializations of agents and games lying on recurrent orbits that
come arbitrarily close to their initial conditions infinitely often. Thirdly,
the time-average agent behavior and utility converge to the Nash equilibrium
values of the time-average game. Finally, we provide a polynomial time
algorithm to efficiently predict this time-average behavior for any such
coevolving network game.
