The Archimedes Combat Modeling Platform

The Archimedes Combat Modeling Platform is a simulator system based on ideas developed from research into the behavior of complex systems. The goals of Archimedes, and more broadly of its sponsor, The United States Marine Corps Combat Development Commands’ Project Albert, is that it be able to represent the intangibles of combat and that it capture the nonlinearity intrinsic to battlefield situations. Intangibles include the roles of discipline, cohesion, morale and personality. Nonlinearity, also called the butterfly effect, applies to systems in which perturbations as seemingly insignificant as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can, over time, grow to the point where they can actually change the outcome of a battle.