We investigate different versions of the minority game, a toy model for agents buying and selling a commodity. The Hamming distance between the strategies used by agents to take decisions is introduced as an analytical tool to determine several properties of these models. The success rate of the agents in an adaptive version of the game is compared with the rate from a stochastic version. It is shown numerically and analytically that the adaptive process is inefficient, increasing the success rate of the unused strategies while decreasing the success rate of the strategies used by the agents. The agents do not do as well as if they were forced to use only one strategy permanently. A version of the game in which the agents strategies evolve is also analyzed using the notion of distance. The agents evolve into a state in which they are all using one strategy, which is again the state that yields the maximum success rate.