Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat [Hardcover]

Andrew Ilachinski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2004 | ISBN-10: 9812388346 | ISBN-13: 978-9812388346

Military conflicts, particularly land combat, possess all of the key attributes of complex adaptive systems: combat forces are composed of many nonlinearly interacting parts and are organized in a dynamic command-and-control hierarchy; local action, which often appears disordered, self-organizes into long-range order; military conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium; military forces adapt to a changing combat environment; and there is no master "voice" that dictates the actions of every soldier (i.e., battlefield action is decentralized). Nonetheless, most modern "state of the art" military simulations ignore the self-organizing properties of combat. This book develops the proposition that combat is more like an interpenetration of two living, coevolving fluids rather than an elastic collision between two hard billiard balls. Artificial-life techniques - specifically, multiagent-based models coupled with evolutionary learning algorithms - provide a powerful new approach to understanding the fundamental processes of war. The book introduces an artificial-life model of combat called EINSTein. Recently developed at the Center for Naval Analyses, USA by the author, EINSTein is one of the first systematic attempts to simulate combat on a small-to-medium scale by using autonomous agents to model individual behaviors and personalities rather than hardware. EINSTein shows that many aspects of land combat may be understood as self-organized, emergent phenomena resulting from the dynamic web of interactions among coevolving agents. Thus, its bottom-up, synthesist approach to modeling combat stands in vivid contrast to the current top-down, reductionist approach taken by conventional models. EINSTein is the first step toward a complex-systems-theoretic toolbox for identifying, exploring, and exploiting self-organized emergent patterns of behavior on the real battlefield.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 784 pages
• Publisher: World Scientific Pub Co Inc (June 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9812388346
• ISBN-13: 978-9812388346
• Product Dimensions: 1.8 x 6.8 x 10.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #493,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #94 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Theory of Computing

More About the Author

I am, by training and profession, a physicist, specializing in the modeling of complex adaptive systems (with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics). However, both by temperament and inner muse, I am a photographer, and have been one for far longer than my Ph.D. gives me any right to claim an ownership by physics. Photography became a life-long pursuit for me the instant my parents gave me a Polaroid instamatic camera for my 10th birthday (35 years ago). I have been studying the mysterious relationship between inner experiences and outer realities ever since.

My creative process is very simple. I take pictures of what calms my soul. There may be other, more descriptive or poetic words that may be used to define the 'pattern' that connects my images, but the simplest meta-pattern is this: I take snapshots of moments in time and space in which a peace washes gently over me, and during which I sense a deep interconnectedness between my soul and the world. Not Cartier-Bresson's 'Decisive Moment,' but rather a "Sudden Stillness."

My favorite quote: "That which you are seeking is doing the seeking." (St. Francis of Assissi)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Pioneering Work of Depth and Breadth!, January 15, 2005

By 

T. Irene Sanders (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat (Hardcover)

This sophisticated yet accessible book has much to offer. While many groups today are applying complexity and agent-based modeling to combat, the models developed by Ilachinski and described in this book, ISAAC and EINSTein, are the true pioneers, and the story behind their development is fascinating.

Following the Vietnam War, a major rethinking about the type of education and skills needed to fight a modern-day war resulted in many reforms that led to the U.S. military's swift victory in "Operation Desert Storm" in 1991. Building on those successes, the United States Marine Corps undertook a search for new discoveries with the potential to influence the military's thinking about and readiness for future conficts. Through this effort they learned about the emerging new field of nonlinear studies, also known as chaos theory and complexity science.

In 1995, under the direction of Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper (now retired) an "Office of New Sciences" was established within the Marine Corps Combat Development Command--a sort of futures think tank for the Marine Corps--to explore the possible applications of complexity to the Marine Corps' strategic thinking about the future of combat.

In the Forward to this book General Van Riper writes, "In an initial discussion Dr. Ilachinski (employed by the Center for Naval Analysis and invited by Gen. Van Riper to meet with him to discuss these ideas) suggested we focus our research on the relevance of complexity theory to land combat because of its unique characteristics, these being hierarchically organized units engaged in multifaceted interactions with each other and the enemy over complicated terrain." This book is the story of the project, insights and models that resulted from those early conversations.

Despite (I write with a laugh) his math and physics background, Ilachinski is a wonderful writer, taking his time with each subject and thus making this book accessible to the nonscientist with a basic understanding of complexity. It's also fun to work with the basic model (described here in detail) and explore some of the more abstract ideas from complexity and their applications to many domains beyond those for which it was originally developed (namely, combat). There is also within this book a self-contained primer on complexity. I was so impressed with the clarity of this section that I asked the book's publisher to make this section available as a separate publication (to which they agreed) for my workshops and seminars on complexity. This book is a valued reference that I have used over and over. As an aside, Andy is also an accomplished photographer (visit his photography website) whose stunning photographs capture nature's elegance, simplicity, beauty and complexity.

As a final tribute to Ilachinski's incredible pioneering work, General Van Riper writes in the book's Forward, "When histories of this era are written Dr. Andrew Ilachinski is likely to emerge as the 'Father of Military Complexity Research'...Those in positions with responsibility for planning and conducting the Nation's defense today and into the foreseeable future ignore this book at great peril for it offers deep and meaningful insights into war on land." You won't be disappointed with this book. It's worth every penny!