Chaos at first glance appears to have nothing to do with human behavior and even less to do with wargaming. But since the early 60s, weak chaos has been the hot subject in many fields of research. It does apply to life and most certainly to wargames! James Gleick describes chaos very lucidly in his 1987 book "Chaos: Making a New Science" (Penguin Books). Researchers from many different disciplines began to notice similar phenomenon. Meteorologists lead the way in when they did computer modeling of weather. Weather, of course, is dominated by repeating patterns. It is safe to say that it will rain sometime. Snow will fall at other times. Tornados will occur. What is difficult to say is when. On the surface, something as pattern based as weather should be easy to figure out. Wrong! The early computer weather models epitomize Newtonian rules writing. The computer is given very deterministic formulas of how weather works. Start the computer up and it will run through the same pattern each time. But if you start it from the middle of the program, the whole pattern changes! "The pattern changes"? That doesn't make sense. If the numbers are the same, and the formula is the same, then it shouldn't matter where one begins the program. But it does. What matters is that it only takes the slightest changes in the variables to eventually send a mathematical formula off into chaotic tangents. In other words, one can know all the "numbers", have an excellent formula, and still not be able to predict the weather. Or when Communism will fall, or when the first man will land on Mars, or what the price of oil will be sic months from now. One can only guess. HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND RULES Chaos has always been the bane of science. The "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry pretend that their disciplines are above such messy inconsistencies. Unfortunately they are not. Newton discovered laws of motion. He was able to show mathematically how one objects gravity influenced another. But Newton's physics were helpless to describe how THREE objects gravity interacts! Newtonian formulas applied to such problems produce gobbledy goop. Einstein fared no better in his work. In fact, physics has been working of the premise of probablilty since the 1920's! They realized that to measure implied apriori influencing the thing that was being measured. Thus the measurements were no good. The "soft" sciences like sociology, psychology, and anthropology try to be predictable "just like physics." With the same miserable results. All these disciplines are very good at "describing" human behavior (using their own jargon, of course). They are incapable of predicting what will happen next. Consider for example a police department that has all its prospective officers interviewed by a psychiatrist to see who will make a good policeman. The shrink asks questions to find out if the person is crazy (1 out of 100 people is). He rules out the psychotics, just like they did in WWII. Then he asks questions to gage for alcoholism (maybe 1 out of 10 drinkers is). He rules out the active drinkers (even though this is fuzzy via civil liberties). Then he asks about violence. People with criminal records are ruled out. Then he is stuck. Mr Jones admits he hit his wife 5 years ago. Does that mean he will do it again? No charges were filed, and Jones looks good in other ways. What is the prediction? The rule of thumb in predicting human behavior is that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Humans then, are doomed to relive all their worse mistakes over and over again. Sounds very Calvinistic. We are predestined to sin and be damned. It may make good theology, but it makes for lousy science. Human behavior, like the weather, is dominated by patterns. One goes through predictable life events (birth, growth, reproduction, death), no matter where one lives. In fact human families tend to have the same patterns of difficulties the world over. Spouses argue, kids misbehave, violence occurs. Soft scientists are able to observe and catalog all of it. But to take the step from measurement to prediction is impossible. SNOW FLAKES Some where buried in the annals of physics is a catalog of crystal growth. The catalog shows pictures of all the snowflakes ever photographed. They are categorized into many different patterns. Many of the flakes are similar, but if one looks closely one can see that none are exactly alike. Each crystal forms in a specific set of conditions. Those conditions are influenced by the air around the flake. As it falls the wind randomly (for all practical purposes) blows the flake through a unique set of circumstances. No snow flake is the same because no flake experiences the exact same set of conditions. There has never been an event where "all things were equal" to another event. Each human event is unique, based on the circumstances it arises in. So what of the rule writers? If there is no reliable prediction. Then how can deterministic rules ever be written? Simple! Guess about what the "reasonable" out comes would be, and ignore all the rest. Rounding off the numbers is what lead to the first discovery of weak chaos in weather prediction programs. They found that those few decimal points left off, in the long run threw all predictions off. So is the rules say high card wins the battle, then the game easily fits the patterns of life (one side won). But if the same set of rules were used again to determine how a series of battle/campaigns would come out, then it might not be a good predictor of events. Obviously games are made and do work, even if they are not good predictors of actual outcomes. In fact, silly games, like Howard Whitehouses Water Pistol Waterloo, are remarkably fun. The fact is that prediction is really the last thing one should expect from games. Given the last of certainty in wargame's deterministic rules, maybe it would be best to drop the debate over "realism" and "authenticity". DBA is as realistic in its outcome as WRG 7th edition is. Neither is a good predictor of which army will win a war. By the numbers, the Persians should have beaten the Greeks. History never seems to work that way. MATRIX GAMES Chaos may be more at home in Matrix Games than other genres. Certainly, I've been accused of "making it up as I go along" many times. If this is true, then MGs are like snow flakes forming in mid air. Each turn's actions influence the actions of subsequent turns. The out come of the game will fit into a set of human patterns, but will never be exactly the same. This is not really surprising. MGs developed when 1 was learning about 1920's German physics and 1940's cybernetics. Both are very situation driven fields of study. Matrix Games teach one to view the world as a set of possibilities rather than certainties. This is one of the reasons why new players have such difficulty understanding what MGs are about. Wargames do not train one to think in this way. They are still by and large Newtonian in world view. And Newton was too darned certain for his own good. Matrix Games are no more predictive than any other game system, of course. They are still just as rule bound as other games. They only differ from other games in that the events can more easily go off on tangents that lead to perfectly reasonable but unpredictable outcomes. This never seems to happen in Avalon Hill games. This is probably the reason why MGs are more effective at gaming chaotic human interactions like politics, economics and revolutions. Events have to be able to be fluid, and unpredictable. This is also why MGs are so poor at resolving tactical actions. The physics of gun fire is not as fluid as human loyalty, so more rigid rules are a better fit to the pattern. RECOGNIZABLE PATTERNS Sam Mustafa put forward the idea that game rules should correspond with the historically recognized patterns of events that occurred in any given war. Thus, English long bowmen shoot very well in 1400, Roman soldiers are expert at maneuver and peasants are poor fighters. This is an excellent notion for wargamers to have in mind. Remember, the soft scientist are very good at recognizing patterns and telling them apart from other Patterns. History is caulk full of patterns. Rigid rules can do a good job with rigid Situations. But more fluid rules would seem to be called for in more chaotic situations. It is disheartening to be attacked as being "wrong, bad, unrealistic, and evil" /hen suggesting trying different alternatives. WEAK CHAOS A mathematician friend of mine told me once that James Gleick was describing weak" chaos. Weather, crystal growth, most human behavior, etc. There is also strong chaos. Strong chaos is what one always used to think about chaos (ie not patterns). hat is the real dividing line between these types of chaos. Weak chaos displays pattern. One can see them in the sky outside. But what happens next is unpredictable. strong chaos is just that, chaos. Rules are at best, guesses about what should happen in life. They are out side parameters. In side the limits, actual events will bounce around seemingly at random. does not seem useful to try to pin this randomness down. The exercise would be :e trying to herd rabbits. Back to Experimental Games Group # 28 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Chris Engle This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com