On 2007-11-28, Robert Melson wrote:
> In article <6rt025-i8c.ln1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Adam Funk <a24061@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>> In the late 1970s or early 80s in either "Mathematical Games" or
>> "Metamagical Themas" (Martin Gardner's and Douglas Hofstadter's
>> columns, respectively) in _Scientific American_, there was an
>> algorithm for a computer simulation of the quantities of surnames in a
>> population over generations (iterations), based on (I think) the
>> frequency distribution of numbers of sons in the late Middle Ages.
>>
>> In this simulation, if you started with 1000 different surnames, a lot
>> of them would simply disappear and a few would become and remain
>> common. This was supposed to explain why various languages/countries
>> all have some especially common surnames but equivalent names (e.g.
>> Smith and Schmidt) are not equally distributed between countries.
>>
>> If I can track down a reference to the precise article, I'll post it.
> Go to the archives for alt.genealogy or soc.genealogy.computing -
> I honestly don't remember which - where there's a recent thread
> initiated by a fellow named Ray Lopez, on just this topic. He's
> written a program to simulate the disappearance of names in a
> population and would, I'm sure, be more than happy to explain
> both his program and the statistics of it all.
By sheer luck I found the article I was thinking about:
A. K. Dewdney, "Computer recreations" (a regular column at that
time, which I think came either after Hofstadter's or between
Gardner's and Hofstadter's), "Branching phylogenetics of the
Paleozoic and the fortunes of English family names", _Scientific
American_, May 1986.
Dewdney credits the surname simulation to Christopher M Sturges and
Brian C Haggatt.
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