Artificial War
Multiagent-based Simulation of Combat

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.