Using Games To Predict Terrorist Actions?

Thanks to Popular Science for its feature article discussing the opportunities for using game-based simulations to predict the actions of "allies, enemies and even terrorists." The article explains: "The need for sim Qaeda agents is taking modelers down strange paths. The team at Moves [creator of the America's Army recruiting game] is trying to model the behavior and thinking of terrorists by creating a series of computer characters to populate a model code-named Iago, after Shakespeare's arch villain." However, Will Wright, creator of The Sims, injects a note of caution with regard to the general concept, pointing out: "As you scale up to larger and larger systems, you can probably model large trends... But what the Iraqi resistance will do over the next month is based on thousands of tiny local factors that seem to always be in flux and to be too granular to be modeled."

Comments

Re:Psycho-history?

[bersl2]

psycho- is how it's spelled. psi upsilon chi (omicron|omega) is the root, from Ancient Greek

and it's Foundation

and birth, not born

otherwise, good English.

now, as to "psychohistory": it seems that someone beat you to the punch. The problem with predicting human behavior is that humans and human society are very complex systems. Read up on your complexity theory and chaos theory.