  We study a five-species cyclic system wherein individuals of one species
strategically adapt their movements to enhance their performance in the spatial
rock-paper-scissors game. Environmental cues enable the awareness of the
presence of organisms targeted for elimination in the cyclic game. If the local
density of target organisms is sufficiently high, individuals move towards
concentrated areas for direct attack; otherwise, they employ an ambush tactic,
maximising the chances of success by targeting regions likely to be dominated
by opponents. Running stochastic simulations, we discover that the ambush
strategy enhances the likelihood of individual success compared to direct
attacks alone, leading to uneven spatial patterns characterised by spiral
waves. We compute the autocorrelation function and measure how the ambush
tactic unbalances the organisms' spatial organisation by calculating the
characteristic length scale of typical spatial domains of each species. We
demonstrate that the threshold for local species density influences the ambush
strategy's effectiveness, while the neighbourhood perception range
significantly impacts decision-making accuracy. The outcomes show that
long-range perception improves performance by over 60\%, although there is
potential interference in decision-making under high attack triggers.
Understanding how organisms' adaptation to their environment enhances their
performance may be helpful not only for ecologists but also for data scientists
aiming to improve artificial intelligence systems.
