The Red Queen Universe: The Cosmological Constant from Agent Games and the Avoidance of Heat Death

The classical picture of the heat death of the universe describes the ultimate fate of the cosmos as a state where, over long time scales, all available free energy is exhausted, the system tends toward thermal equilibrium and maximum entropy, and all macroscopic structures and computational activities cease. However, the observational fact that the universe has continuously generated and maintained multi-level low-entropy structures---especially life and intelligent civilizations---over approxi