Modeling and Simulation of Agents in Resource Strategy Games

Abstract : Military, diplomatic, and intelligence analysts are increasingly interested in having a valid system of models that span the social sciences and interoperate so that one can determine the effects that may arise from alternative courses of action in different lands. Part I of this article concentrated on internal validity of the components of such a synthetic framework. But how valid are such model collections once they are integrated together and used out-of-sample (see Section 1)? Section 2 compares these realistic, descriptive agents to normative rational actor theory and offers insights for conflict games. Sections 3 and 4 offer two real world cases (Iraq and SE Asia) where the agent models are subjected to validity tests and an EBO experiment is then run for each case. We conclude by arguing that substantial effort on game realism, best-of-breed social science models, and agent validation efforts is essential if analytic experiments are to effectively explore conflicts and alternative ways to influence outcomes. Such efforts are likely to improve behavioral game theory as well.