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

Psico-history?

[BRSloth]

That reminds me the excellent "Fundation" series by Isaac Asimov. In that book, there was a man that created a new research line called "psico-history". That research allow him to say what would happen in the future by using statistics over a large group of people, and the predictions only worked on large groups, not on individuals. Someting like "a group will always work in some ways, but an individual will work randomly".

It seems that we are seeing the born of psico-history, using games.

Simulations have their limitations.

[no longer myself]

It's the same thing with hurricane predictions. Oh sure, they've got a decent grip on about where it's headed, but those things can change direction and completely nullify any predictions made 24 hours earlier.

Reality doesn't scale down to the simulation level very well when you need an extreme degree of accuracy.

"Terrorists only have to be lucky once. We have to be lucky every time." -can't remember who said it.