CSMA'98

MISSION EARTH TRACK

November 2, 1998

PREFACE

by

John McLeod, P.E.


I have said and written the following so often that I might be accused of having a mantra: "The chances of solving a problem are greatly enhanced if we understand the milieu in which it is embedded -- and computer simulation is a powerful tool for understanding."

Can that reasoning be applied to the scourge of war? I believe that it is worth a try. This is not a new idea.

Herewith my edited version of excerpts from what Takeshi Utsumi, Chairman, GLOSAS/USA (Global Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the USA) has written under the heading "Inception of Global Peace Gaming" in a book now in preparation. JM

"After attending the 1972 Summer Computer Simulation Conference in San Diego, California, I visited Bob Noel of the Political Science Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. A conference room had a wall-sized world map with an American flag standing by. It was like a situation room of a governmental agency. The adjacent room was a control room with a short-wave radio which could receive world news instantaneously.

"The room's wall adjacent to the conference room had a glass window from which they could video tape the activities of the conference. Dr. Noel was conducting a political gaming simulation on international affairs using ARPANET [the predecessor of the Internet] by assigning several different schools to act as the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, Japan, China, etc. Students had to study the assigned countries before the start of the game.

"I asked him who was acting for Japan. He said the University of Southern California. So I said to him, 'However hard Americans may study about Japan, they cannot think as Japanese, since they eat steak with a knife and fork while Japanese eat noodles with chopsticks. So I proposed that he invite the University of Tokyo to play the role of the Japanese government.

"During my conversation with Bob Noel I also proposed to him that all participating game players should have their systems dynamics type computer simulation models test and predict their proposed policies so that they could make quantitative discussions based on reliable facts and figures.

"Jay Forrester of MIT once said that the primary purpose of system dynamics simulation is NOT for its prediction/forecasting, but for the clearer understanding of such interdependent relationships of social factors. I thought that this, with scientific and rational analysis and critical thinking, ought to be the basic principle of global education for peace.

"This was when the original idea of Globally Collaborative Peace Gaming was born...We therefore need here to include a 'normative gaming' approach, with the use of negotiation techniques by participating game-players of various countries whose traditions and cultures are different from one another, to exercise conflict resolution, and hence the collaborative environmental peace gaming, namely, the quantitative simulation approach based on facts and figures should be complemented by qualitative, normative gaming.

"Gaming players dealing with global issues from their own locations should utilize all available telecommunication media for communicating with their counterparts. This is why we need distributed global simulation models. We will try to rely on the expertise of participating regions and sectors for their data base and simulation model building, which databases and submodels will then be tied together through global neural computer networks, i.e. the Internet, to have the connected whole act as a single system."

That was 26 years ago. Today, through the efforts of Utsumi and others the communication infrastructure is now fully capable of supporting such "Peace Gaming". In an effort to further the process, I am organizing this MISSION EARTH session for the SCS CSMA'98 conference in Orlando, Florida, November 2, 1998. I consider this program something of a marshalling exercise to gather in one place some of the ideas and information pertinent to developing a model to use in the "What If" mode to examine various possibilities for reducing dangerous tensions that could lead to anything from local skirmishes to all-out war. If, in our exploring we goof and start a war, OK. No one will be hurt in a simulated war.