Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents: A Case Study with Hamas

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD-08)

Volume

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD-08)

Contents

Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) have been proposed as a paradigm for reasoning about cultural groups, terror groups, and other socio-economic-political-military organizations worldwide. In this paper, we describe a case study that shows how SOMA was used to model the behavior of the terrorist organization, Hamas. Our team, consisting of a mix of computer scientists, policy experts, and political scientists, were able to understand new facts about Hamas of which even seasoned Hamas experts may not have been aware. This paper briefly overviews SOMA rules, explains how several thousand SOMA rules for Hamas were automatically derived, and then describes a few key findings about Hamas, enabled by this framework.