in the battle of tabuk, unlike other battles, the participation of muslims was very weak and their procrastinations caused to be delayed in the preparation of the army and the move toward tabuk. some of the companions expressed one’s regrets for being unable to participate in this battle. in the sura of tawba, god exposes the intentions of these non-participants, expressing their real reasons f...

[The Romans] do not begin to use their weapons first in time of war, nor do they then put their hands first into motion, while they avoided so to do in times of peace; but as if their weapons did always cling to them, they have never any truce from warlike exercises; . . . nor would he be mistaken that should call those their exercises unbloody battles, and their battles bloody exercises.— Flav...

We study a contest between two teams. The teams include an equal number of players. Each player of a team participates in a component battle, competing against a matched rival from the other team. A team wins if and only if its players prevail in a suffi ciently large number of component battles. The winning team is awarded a prize, which is a public good for all its players. In addition, a pla...

Portfolio Online Evolution is a novel method for playing real-time strategy games through evolutionary search in the space of assignments of scripts to individual game units. This method builds on and recombines two recently devised methods for playing multi-action games: (1) Portfolio Greedy Search, which searches in the space of heuristics assigned to units rather than in the space of actions...

Online gamers form clans voluntarily to play together and to discuss their real and virtual lives. Although these clans have diverse goals, they seek to increase their rank in the game community by winning more battles. Communications among clan members and battles with other clans may influence the performance of a clan. In this study, we compared the effects of communication structure inside ...

A rigid sheath that extends deep into the prothorax of male Parisoschoenus expositus serves to receive the horns of opponents in battles over females. The male cannot use his own horn unless he receives his opponent's horn in his sheath. The length of a male's sheath is always approximately equal to the length of his own horns, so his body design is appropriate only for horn-locking battles wit...