	SSP 1994 project summary:

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Imulated Evolutionary Stable Strategies

The theory of evolutionary stable stategies is currently generally accepted in the ecological community, based on "proofs" from simple game theory (Maynard-Smith). The basic concept is that often the behavioural nature of individuals may appear to be unstable, until one considers the effects of adopting an alternative strategy. For example, some species exhibit apparent altruism in situations where blatant selfishness would return an immediate benefit. ESS theory suggests that this altruism occurs because if all (or a large number) of individuals were selfish, then the whole species would be detrimentally affected. Thus the "gene" for selfishness has been "deselected" by evolution.

Such potential evolutionary effects are very difficult to prove, as the typical timescales for evolution are so long. However, with the availability of machines such as the CM-200, the facility to run computer simulations of such systems is now becoming possible. Work has already been completed by the proposer in which single behavioural rules are tested in an evolution simulation. What is now needed is a competitive simulation of such rules, as this may lead us towards some initial understanding of ESS.

James Hammerton worked on this project.

Compressed PostScript of James' final report is available here (1777449 bytes) .

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