In the third installment of this symposium, which originally appeared in the Communication the ACM, we go back to 1981. More than 30 years ago, I called on ACM members to employ more experimental methods and avoid confusing hacking (tinkering) with true science. Joining a long tradition of ACM Presidents speaking up about computing as science.

In this article, David Fogel discusses the relationship between evolutionary computation and evolutionary game theory. The mathematics of evolutionary game theory relies on assumptions that often fail to describe the real-world conditions that the theory is intended to model. This article highlights those assumptions and suggests evolutionary computation may ultimately serve as a more useful approach to understanding complex adaptive systems in nature.