Don Chappell made a comment regarding my oft-expressed skepticism regarding OA applications on so-called "soft factors." Attached is a rather ambitious attempt at this, entitled "Gaming and Simulating Ethno-Political Conflicts," presented in August 2006 at the Descartes Conference on Mathematical Models in Counterterrorism, written by Barry Silverman, Gnana Bharathy, and Benjamin Nye out of University of Pennsylvania. This is also posted online at URL:
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~barryg/EthnoPoliGame.pdf
These kinds of models are great at performing "control functions" in command post exercises and the like...great fun for players...but I'd be extremely reticent to use them for predictive/validation purposes--Godel's Incompleteness Theorem applies here.