Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat (ISAAC): An artificial-life approach to land combat

Artificial-life techniques – specifically, agent-based models and evolutionary learning algorithms – provide a potentially powerful new approach to understanding some of the fundamental processes of combat. This article takes a step toward this goal by introducing two simple artificial-life-like ‘toy models’ of land combat called ISAAC and EINSTein. These models are designed to illustrate how certain aspects of land combat can be viewed as emergent phenomena resulting from the collective, nonlinear, decentralized interactions among notional combatants. Their bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat stands in stark contrast to the more traditional top-down, or reductionist approach taken by most conventional models, and represents a preliminary step toward developing a complex systems theoretic analyst's toolbox for identifying, exploring, and possibly exploiting self-organized emergent collective patterns of behavior on the battlefield. The research described here has been sponsored, in part, by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) and the Office of Naval Research. A Windows 95/98 executable of EINSTein (currently under development) is freely available from http://www.cna.org/isaac.