Irreducible semi-autonomous adaptive combat (ISAAC): An artificial life approach to land combat

{ Abstract { This paper introduces a simple multiagent-based \toy model " of land combat called ISAAC (Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat) to illustrate how certain aspects of land combat can be viewed as emergent phenomena resulting from the collective, nonlinear, decentralized interactions among notional combatants. ISAAC takes a bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat, vice the more traditional topdown, or reductionist approach, and represents a ¯rst step toward developing a complex systems theoretic analyst's toolbox for identifying, exploring, and possibly exploiting emergent collective patterns of behavior on the battle¯eld. This model was developed as part of a recently completed project, sponsored by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC), that assessed the general applicability of \complex systems theory " to land warfare. Nunquam ponenda est pluralitatis sine necessitate. (\Though shalt not seek an explanation based on more complex mechanisms, until you are satis¯ed that simpler mechanisms will not do!"

Eight Tiers of Applicability.................................................... 3

Tier-I: General metaphors for complexity in war............................. 3 Tier-II: Policy and General Guidelines for Strategy.......................... 4 Tier-III: Conventional warfare models and approaches....................... 5 Tier-IV: Description of the complexity of combat............................ 5 Tier-V: Combat technology enhancement................................... 6 Tier-VI: Combat aids for the battlefield.................................... 6 Tier-VII: Synthetic combat environments................................... 7 Tier-VIII: Original conceptualizations of combat............................

Are motorways rational from slime mould's point of view?

We analyse the results of our experimental laboratory approximation of motorway networks with slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Motorway networks of 14 geographical areas are considered: Australia, Africa, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Iberia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, UK and USA. For each geographical entity, we represented major urban areas by oat flakes and inoculated the slime mould in a capital. After slime mould spanned all urban areas with a network of its protoplasmic tubes, we extracted a generalised Physarum graph from the network and compared the graphs with an abstract motorway graph using most common measures. The measures employed are the number of independent cycles, cohesion, shortest paths lengths, diameter, the Harary index and the Randić index. We obtained a series of intriguing results, and found that the slime mould approximates best of all the motorway graphs of Belgium, Canada and China, and that for all entities studied the best match between Physarum and motorway graphs is detected by the Randić index (molecular branching index)