Category: Ecology

Summary: Examining whether adaptive mobility preserves coexistence in rock-paper-scissors dynamics under delayed information and timing jitter.

Cyclic ecological competition can maintain biodiversity, but mobility changes may either stabilize coexistence or accelerate collapse depending on timing. This experiment asks how delayed information and random timing jitter change the value of adaptive mobility in a rock-paper-scissors system.

The script compares adaptive and fixed policies while measuring coexistence fraction, spatial or state entropy, and early extinction frequency across several jitter levels. By focusing on the difference between adaptive and fixed control, it tests whether the mobility rule remains helpful once the feedback signal becomes noisy in time.

That matters because ecological and evolutionary systems rarely react on a perfectly regular clock. The result helps identify whether adaptive response remains robust or instead depends on precise timing.

Method: Repeated rock-paper-scissors simulations with delayed and jittered mobility control, aggregated into coexistence and entropy statistics.

What is measured: Coexistence fraction, mean entropy, early-extinction indicator, adaptive-minus-fixed coexistence difference, and effect size at nonzero jitter.