Reconstructing a Virtual Iraq

David Plotz has a nice piece at Slate on Iraq: The Computer Game. Everyone's heard of the Department of Defense using shoot-'em-ups like Doom to train soldiers, but another game genre is starting to take hold as well: massively multiplayer role-playing games. If you can create a virtual world, like the Sims or EverQuest, that matches real-world conditions, the outcome of the game can provide hints for how the real world will unfold. This isn't just blue-sky thinking, either. General Wesley Clark commissioned a didactic system called SENSE, in which each player played a stakeholder in postwar Bosnia. He had the new Bosnian government play different roles in the game, to show them the consequences of different policies. The game got so heated that the opposition leader had to go on television after one session and explain why the country fell apart while he was playing the role of President. These games are also good for observing group behavior. This is where Iraq comes in. Edward Castronova from Cal State was approached by the DoD for suggestions on how to model the politics of post-war Iraq. He suggested that they update the War of the Roses strategy game Kingmaker. If you can accurately model the situation, and let the computer simulate each significant role, a few million simulations should give you a sense of how likely certain situations are: if the new Iraq doesn't join NATO, Iran will invade 25% of the time. The utility of these simulations is not for prediction, but analysis: they can provide a list of outcomes that policymakers could apply to their pet theories. The most intriguing idea is described by Plotz as NorthKorea.com: create a world that simulates the conditions of North Korea, and let thousands of gamers loose on it. Each player would act in their own interests, and the aggregate effect of their actions would provide an excellent insight on the internal politics of the country. The players would treat it as a game, of course, but observers could glean valuable intelligence from it. The greater story here is in the use of actual humans to perform a simulation. It's notoriously difficult to effectively model human behavior. The great insight here is that modelling human behavior is unnecessary: with a set of networked players, you can incorporate the genuine article.

Fox Guards Henhouse

Anyone who thinks for a living has been plagued by "business talk." "Synergy", "leverage", "touch base", etc. They're weapons in the hand of consultants, and can be shields for the stupid. More than anything, they're shibboleths, a substitute for real thinking. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu helped create this golem, but now they've seen the error of their ways. To aid in the battle against handwaving, they're released a piece of free software: Bullfighter. It analyzes documents for these bullshit words, and ranks them accordingly. Oh! Those bandy-legged roustabouts! They're in touch with my inner Dilbert! They understand what's it's like here in the trenches! They sympathize with me! They're here to help. Physician, heal thyself.

Web Diarists, Collaborative Filtering, and Scale-Free Networks

Even though it disparages Josh Marshall, we have to thank No Data Source for the new Hugh Hewitt piece on the Big Four web logs. There was a time when web-based journalism was supposed to somehow revolutionize the delivery of news. The combination of low overhead and accessibility that web sites provide was supposed to wrest control of news from corporations and put it in the hands of the people. Now, presumably, anyone can publish their own broadsheet. It's unavoidable that readership is going to gravitate towards a small group of news providers -- no one person can read everything. The decision of which news sources to read is influenced in large part by their visiblity and referrals from friends -- it's a textbook scale-free network, where things that are popular tend to stay popular, and the ignored stay ignored. The result is Hewitt's Big Four: Instapundit, Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan and the Volokh Conspiracy. Together, these four news outlets exert an enormous amount of influence over the day's agenda, reducing most publishers (like ourselves) to echoes and rehashings of thier posts. This is natural, of course -- reputation and habit are an essential part of the intellectual economy. It's also functionally identical to the "corporate media" problem: the agenda's controlled by a handful. It's useful to look at how computer scientists deal with this "collaborative filtering" problem. After a time, ranking items by strict popularity becomes less useful. The homogenization of search results are going to prevent valuable but unknown items from being found. The simplest solution is to insert unpopular items, at random. This doesn't interfere too much with the accuracy of the results, but does give a fighting chance to the underdogs. For you, the news consumer, this means occasionally trying something new. Just visit WebLogs or another blog aggregate service, and see if you can't find a new favorite. Unfortunately, scale-free networks tend to discourage this behavior. You need a large number of people accidentally picking up the same underdog at the same time in order to gather enough momentum to bring it to the top. Epidemiology studies scale-free networks, too. Viruses get passed around by a core group, and infect populations in clusters. So, it seems, truth is a virus.

Blix: “Bastards” Get Him Down

Now that he's retiring after three years as the Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix seems to have found a new voice. He gave an interview with the Guardian in which he called out the "bastards" in the Bush Administration who interfered with the inspection process. They leaned on him for more damning language in the reports, gave him bad intelligence, and were dismissive of the UN in general. "There are people in this [US] administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things," he said. They believe it is "alien power, even if it does hold considerable influence within it. Such [negative] feelings don't exist in Europe where people say that the UN is a lot of talk at dinners and fluffy stuff." He also says that despite of the bad apples, his relationship with the United States was good.