After completing the exercise, a trainee receives an evaluation, said Bill Swartout, the institute's director of technology.
"Depending on the path you took, a particular tape is played," he said. Because there are only a few possible paths in this version of the simulation, he said, it is possible to record the evaluations in advance.
As the simulation becomes more sophisticated, there will be more choices for the lieutenant, and software will put the story together on the fly.
Part of the problem with modeling emotions, Zachary said, is a dearth of experimental data in actual situations. "We just have anecdotes," he said, "because the ethics of research in modern American culture say you can't put people in experiments and scare them to death."
Few settings are more frightening than a battlefield. Even when there is information about actual behavior under dangerous conditions, it is linked so strongly to that particular time and place that few conclusions can be drawn.
"You can have the best-laid plans, and once the flag goes up, those plans are gone," said David M. Nicol, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College. "Often it's the case that things hinge on the actions of one small group or one individual that shape the force or the outcome. So if you're dealing with statistical models of human behavior, you'd run into battle 10 times and get 10 different outcomes."
Modeling the behavior of one's own forces is hard, but building such models for enemy soldiers or foreign civilians is much harder, even when an opponent's cultural and ideological foundations may be well documented.
Silverman's research, for instance, focuses on modeling terrorist behavior. Silverman evaluates his models by comparing them with the actual motives and behaviors observed for various groups.
In one project he is working on, the human player is the leader of a squad guarding a checkpoint at a bridge. All the other participants are simulations. In the exercise, a school bus approaches, filled with women and children. The bus also holds armed terrorists who are planning an attack.
"Throughout the ages," Silverman said, "we have been taught that emotions are the opposite of rationality and that cold logic is devoid of emotions." But new research shows that most decisions are guided by emotions, he said. "It's ironic, but to build realistic, clever software agents, we are giving them emotions and the capability of emotionally reacting to events and actions."
Silverman is optimistic about how quickly the new direction in research will prove effective. "It's definitely coming together," he said.
"We're at the early stage, and there's a lot more theory than data." To make further advances, Pew of BBN Technologies said, will require closer cooperation between psychologists and computer scientists.
"If we want to be more successful with computer models, we need to go deeper into the psychology of how people perform," he said. "Because many of the models are ginned up by computer scientists who don't know anything about human behavior."
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