TABLE OF CONTENTS A small number of rules or laws can generate systems of surprising complexity. Moreover, this complexity is not just the complexity of random patterns. Recognizable features exist In addition, the systems are animated; they change over time. Though the laws are invariant, the things they govern change The rules or laws generate the complexity, and the ever-changing flux of patterns that follow leads to perpetual novelty and emergence.
John Holland, Hidden Order [Holl95]
One of the most important fundamental and unsolved problems in artificial-life research is to understand the dynamical relationship between an organism s genotype or the set of primitive instructions that define an organism (and as encoded by the organism s chromosome) and its phenotype, or the organism s emergent, macroscopic form (which includes both its morphology and how it interacts with other organisms). In the context of combat, this question assumes the form:
What is the relationship between the set of primitive rules that define the actions of individual soldiers (i.e., agents, within a model) and the emergent behavioral characteristics of a large number of soldiers when they are engaged in combat (i.e., agent-agent interactions)?
The organism in this case, is a multiagent force. EINSTein Enhanced ISAAC Neural Simulation Toolkit [*] is a multiagent artificial life laboratory whose design and development is predicated on the fundamental belief that the italicized question above is best answered by equating combat force with complex adaptive system, and thereby bringing to bear on the problem the same mathematical and simulation tools...
