John Maynard Smith

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John Maynard Smith, (January 6, 1920 – April 19, 2004 ) was a British theoretical evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and latterly Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex.

=SOMA= In 1961, John Maynard Smith created a chess machine called SOMA, the Smith One-Move Analyzer, as a challenger of Donald Michie's and Shaun Wylie's early program Machiavelli from 1947-48, of whose method of working he was in ignorance. Later John Maynard Smith built a SOMA-Machiavelli hybrid named SOMAC (SOMA with features taken from the Machiavelli). This machine, when allowed a lookahead of two, has a standard of play equal to that of a mediocre human player ... .

=ESS= In 1973, Maynard Smith formalized a central concept in game theory called the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), based on a verbal argument by George R. Price and published in 1982.

=Selected Publications=
 * John Maynard Smith (1958). The Theory of Evolution. [Harmondsworth, Middlesex], Penguin Books.
 * John Maynard Smith, Donald Michie (1961). Machines that play games. New Scientist, 12, 367-9. google books
 * Jack Good, A. J. Mayne, John Maynard Smith (eds.) (1962). The Scientist Speculates. Heinemann
 * Donald Michie (1966). Game Playing and Game Learning Automata. Advances in Programming and Non-Numerical Computation, Leslie Fox (ed.), pp. 183-200. Oxford, Pergamon. Includes Appendix: Rules of SOMAC by John Maynard Smith
 * John Maynard Smith and George R. Price (1973). The logic of animal conflict. Nature 246:15-18
 * John Maynard Smith (1982). Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.
 * John Maynard Smith (1988). Games, Sex, and Evolution. New York, Harvester-Wheatsheaf.
 * John Maynard Smith (1989). Evolutionary Genetics. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
 * John Maynard Smith (1992). Byte-sized evolution. Nature 355, 772-773
 * John Maynard Smith (1996). The games lizards play. Nature 380, 198-199
 * Manfred D. Laubichler, Edward H. Hagen, Peter Hammerstein (2005). The Strategy Concept and John Maynard Smith’s Influence on Theoretical Biology. pdf
 * Karl Sigmund (2005). John Maynard Smith and Evolutionary Game Theory. Interim Report IR-05-076, pdf

=External Links=
 * John Maynard Smith from Wikipedia
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - John Maynard Smith
 * John Maynard Smith from Centre for the Study of Evolution - University of Sussex
 * Modern Theorist Biographies - Section 1
 * John Maynard Smith - Seven Wonders of the World, YouTube Video

=References=

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