The Minority Game: an introductory guide

The Minority Game is a simple model for the collective behavior of agents in an idealized situation where they have to compete through adaptation for a finite resource. This review summarizes the statistical mechanics community efforts to clear up and understand the behavior of this model. Our emphasis is on trying to derive the underlying effective equations which govern the dynamics of the original Minority Game, and on making an interpretation of the results from the point of view of the statistical mechanics of disordered systems.