To What Extent is War a Self-Organized Emergent Dynamical Process?

ISAAC/EINSTein/PyEINSTein are simple interactive "artificial-life laboratories" for exploring collective, self-organized, emergent behavior in land combat. Both models simulate (small to medium scale) combat by using autonomous agents to model individual behaviors and personalities rather than specific weapons. Agent-based simulations of complex adaptive systems are becoming an increasingly popular exploratory tool in the artificial-life community, and are predicated on the basic idea that the (often complicated) global behavior of a real system derives, collectively, from simpler, low-level interactions among its constituent agents. In the context of modeling combat, agent-based simulations represent a fundamental shift from focusing on simple force-on-force attrition calculations to considering how complex, high-level properties and behaviors of combat emerge out of (sometimes coevolving) low-level rules of behaviors and interactions. Because agents are all endowed with a rudimentary form of "intelligence," they can respond to a very large class of unscripted, changing conditions as they evolve during battle. Because of the relative simplicity of the underlying dynamical rules, EINSTein can rapidly provide outcomes for a wide spectrum of tunable parameter values defining specific scenarios, and thus be used to effectively map out the space of possible behaviors. In ISAAC and EINSTein, the final outcome of a battle -- as defined, say, by measuring the surviving force strengths -- takes second stage to exploring how two forces might co-evolve during combat.

The initial phase of this project (completed in September 1997, and culminating in preliminary work on ISAAC) was sponsored by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (Quantico, VA) as part of a two-year project that assessed the general applicability of complex systems theory to land warfare. EINSTein's ongoing development is funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research.

"In a true system...not all macroscopic properties follow from the properties of components and their combinations. Macroscopic properties often do not result from static structures, but from dynamic interactions playing both within the system and between the system and its environment."
-- Erich Jantsch, The Self Organizing Universe