How Chinese military science is looking to nature to design war games
- Researchers are trying to develop systems that are open-ended rather than closed off from the wider world
- Many non-military elements such as social media and power infrastructure need to be taken into account, they say
Researchers helping to develop China’s next generation of war simulation programs are looking to nature to plot a model of conflict, with battles evolving more like organisms than machines.
In a paper published in the Chinese Journal of System Simulation this month, researchers from the PLA National Defense University’s college of joint operations said such modelling should not be an end product used in a closed setting, but constantly evolving to adapt to an open-world environment.
“The new war-game system should be treated as a ‘living organism’,” professor Hu Xiaofeng and his colleagues said.
“Ecological creation is a highly complex system of engineering. There is no mature technical solution to follow. It requires continuous ‘trial and error’ in practice.”
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War-game systems are used to try to predict an outcome of a conflict and have traditionally been treated as a physical process. But that approach is seen as less effective as modern military operations become more complex.