7 ms·

Computer simulations suggest war drove the rise of civilizations

50 points by llambda 13y ago

chris_mahan 13y ago
Psychohistory?
- ninetenel 13y ago
  in the seldon plan we trust
ktavera 13y ago
Thomas Sowell wrote a spectacular book in the same vein as this. http://www.amazon.com/Conquests-And-Cultures-International-History/dp/0465014003 http://www.amazon.com/Conquests-And-Cultures-International-H... Extraordinary amount of detail as to why war drives the rise of new civilizations.
lambdasquirrel 13y ago
What about trade? Paul krugman (the economist known for his liberal views) wrote a compelling thesis on the role of transport costs in the rise and fall of manufacturing hubs, etc. It might explain the empires unaccounted for in this model.
diydsp 13y ago
Intriguing concept and neat approach (tower defense anyone?), but many of us perceive civilization as arising much earlier, around 10,500 BCE. Also, I cringe over this statement: "if military technology is removed as a factor, the model’s accuracy falls to a mere 16 percent." That's like saying, "If you take the beans out of my soup, it doesn't taste like potatoes as much."
scotty79 13y ago
> if military technology is removed as a factor, the model’s accuracy falls to a mere 16 percent Imho technology drives culture. Drives our history. History focusing on dates and decisions of individuals or relations between groups of people and their character is bogus narrative. It should focus on technology available and how this technology enabled things to happen. It's often claimed that our technological development outpaced our cultural development. I think that's not the case. Imho only new technology can cause culture to change. If not for development of nuclear weapons we would never could form culture that makes us civilized enough not to use it.
- melipone 13y ago
  But war drives technology.
  - pyre 13y ago
    War is a driver of technology.
  - scotty79 13y ago
    War accelerates development of technology same way as science accelerates development of technology same way as commerce accelerates development of technology but new wars and new science and new forms and magnitudes of commerce are possible only because of the new technology (new tools of war, science and commerce to be precise). There are multiple feedback loops like that but common point of all those loops is technology.
vidarh 13y ago
The graphic in the article shows that their model predicts civilizations with the highest likelihood along coasts and major waterways, rapidly declining the further inland you get . It would seem like you could get a similarly inaccurate model by simply modelling people preferring to live by the coast, and only displacing inland when density along the coast gets too high. I'm sure war had a substantial role, but their model doesn't seem to predict anything it couldn't have without considering warfare at all.
btilly 13y ago
Here is my guess. This is not the first iteration of the computer simulation. They keep tuning the simulation until it produces better and better results. But are you getting better results because the simulation is right, or because it was implicitly fit to the historical data? In machine learning terms, their training set and test set are the same, so odds are that the model is bunk.
- milesskorpen 13y ago
  Could you reasonably investigate this by creating a model for one time period, and then applying it to another time period? Alternatively, train it with one region (say Europe) and then test a second region which is mostly isolated (Americas, if we know enough, or Japan / SE Asia).
  - icefox 13y ago
    If your interested in this in more detail I just finished "guns germs and steel" which I would recommend for a enjoyable (to me) overview of old history.
    - yk 13y ago
      In the same genre Ian Morris Why the west rules - for now is also very good. ( And if you did not already read it, Collapse by Diamond.)
  - btilly 13y ago
    Yes. But if you're trying to improve the model, only take ideas from training in one region. Never, ever, look at how it failed in the test region because you'll quickly fall in the "overfitting for your data" trap.
- tomrod 13y ago
  That was my first thought too. But it publishes, I guess.
- yk 13y ago
  Depends on the model, if they build a model 'from first principles,' whatever that means in history, then they can probably do something interesting. ( Or if they caution themselves enough.) But of course, without actually reading the paper ( ars did link the wrong doi), it is hard to tell what they actually tried to archive or how they build their model.
eksith 13y ago
Are we sure that it was definitively war or merely the availability of resources that gave rise to civilizations? Water, rich soil, minerals (E.G. Iron, Copper, Gold etc...) This sort of modeling is very tricky and, even though I don't want to put down the effort that went into this, I'm not sure if they controlled for other factors. We do know that people started war over these very resources, so it shouldn't be surprising that banding together (I.E. forming societies and by extension, civilizations) was a good way to prevent these from being taken by more powerful adversaries. The technology to defend, seize and improve these resources can also build civilizations so while war may be a factor that is common to it, calling it a cause is a bit of a rush to judgment IMO.
erikig 13y ago
Interesting article, it disnt mention tha there's also a common anthropological hypothesis popularized by Claude Levi Straus that the basis of these wars was inception of the incest taboo: http://m.vice.com/read/the-a-to-z-of-sexual-history-incest http://m.vice.com/read/the-a-to-z-of-sexual-history-incest
crusso 13y ago
I'm so extraordinarily sick of "Computer Simulations <whatever>" being reported with any real credibility as though the Computer Simulation part means accuracy. Sadly, the public can't tell the difference between "Computer Simulations Predict Aerodynamic Qualities of a Porche 911" and "Computer Simulations Show Where Noah's Ark Landed". This article and simulation looks halfway between the two examples above... maybe closer to the Noah's Ark one.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  P'shaw, we all know Noah's Ark is up on Mt. Ararat on Armenian land politically owned by Turkey.
  - moomin 13y ago
    Well they do if they've read Declare anyway. Not enough people properly appreciate the Kim Philby connection.
- malandrew 13y ago
  Yup. Computer simulations like many other tools of understanding are at best a lever for the mind. It will multiply feats of both intelligence and stupidity.
- vacri 13y ago
  It reminds me of those shows that pit ninjas against vikings - "computer simulations show a -foo- would win. We ran it ten times and the ninja won 7 of them!". You've got to have a lot of faith that the designers of the simulation knew what they were talking about in minute detail. Just eyeballing their graphs, I would say their model is doing better at predicting areas weighted by soil fertility and temperate lattitudes. It's missing some giant areas from the data graph. Also, without defining what they mean when they say 'civilisation', it's pretty worthless for any real work.
mumbi 13y ago
I believe it. Competition.
jlgreco 13y ago
I prefer the beer theory. Settling down and growing things doesn't seem like a military tactic that pays off in the short term. Quite the opposite actually... that is probably a great way to get slaughtered. However it does make sense if your objective is to get wasted.
- trentmb 13y ago
  I suppose, if you completely discount fortifications.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I do, since I am unaware of ancient fortifications as old as the earliest farming communities. Perhaps they did exist, but it seems to me that a farm is a prerequisite for fortifications since fortifications require you to stay in one place for an extended period of time. (Staying in one place requires you to stop following around the herd of whatever you eat. Farms however are much easier to bootstrap. You can plant a field then abandon it, only to come back later). Basically, my understanding is that city walls tended to be built after cities.
    - Ma8ee 13y ago
      The palisade around the village probably came after people had settled there, but I can imagine someone building a wall to have somewhere to go whenever you are attacked, and that place eventually also became the place where people went to trade, thus wall before city.
    - trentmb 13y ago
      Fortifications don't have to be man-made.
frozenport 13y ago
I have trouble with this notion because aboriginal tribes have a history of fighting amongst each other. Perhaps the rise of civilization brought on what the authors consider was war? I also don't understand what predict 65% accuracy means? If we are taking about overlap between two binary variables, this is abysmally low.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Turchin's underlying hypothesis is that "imperiogenesis" occurs at "meta ethnic faultlines". That is: wars between culturally-similar groups don't give rise to this effect. Wars between culturally-dissimilar groups do.
wildgift 13y ago
screw civilization.
johnward 13y ago
I ran my computer simulation (Civ 5) and came to the same conclusion.
jacques_chester 13y ago
Turchin published a book about his theory of the rise of powerful civilisations, and his theory about their decline, called War and Peace and War. I reviewed it here: http://chester.id.au/2012/05/14/review-war-and-peace-and-war/ http://chester.id.au/2012/05/14/review-war-and-peace-and-war... This article covers the creation side. It's worth mentioning that in the book he requires these wars to be between very dissimilar groups. The intense differences create a much nastier competitive dynamic, creating much higher social and cultural pressure. Eventually one group wipes the other(s) out, establishing a new imperial civilisation.
zeteo 13y ago
Maybe this is legit, but 500-1500 CE seems the worst historical period to be testing such models. Neither civilized areas nor technology (except in China) changed much during that period. Models that were accurate for periods such as 3500-2000 BCE or 1500-1900 CE would be much more interesting.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Where do you get the idea that 500-1500 CE didn't change much? More happened then than 500 BCE - 500 CE, 1500 BCE - 500 BCE, or really any millenium except 1500 CE - 2500 CE.
  - zeteo 13y ago
    > Where do you get the idea that 500-1500 CE didn't change much? If we consider military technology, gunpowder had hardly begun to have an impact. Machiavelli's Art of War (1521) still recommends Roman military equipment and methods. Armored cavalry, pikemen, archers dominated the battlefields in 1500 CE; all familiar to Byzantines and Sassanids 1000 years before. And the centers of civilization in the Old World (Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean, India, China) were pretty much established by 300 BCE if not well before that.
    - iskander 13y ago
      What about medicine? The leap from Galen (whose methods dominated Europe for a shockingly long time) to Islamic-era methods was pretty dramatic. You have the invention of modern surgical methods in Cordoba in the 10th century (many still used), use of antiseptics to clean wounds, general elevation of evidence-based methods for pharmacology, rise of teaching hospitals, etc.. Medicine doesn't necessarily shift the borders of empire but it does dramatically affect the quality and duration of a typical person's life. The difference between being born in the 6th century vs. the 11th would (to us) I think be painful brutal existence vs. civilization.
    - vacri 13y ago
      If you define technology as 'gunpowder', then of course not. But technology is far, far more than this. The idea of the 'dark ages' in this time period is generally scoffed at by historians. Like, for example, the number 0. It rose to prominence right in the middle of this period. Or in agriculture, we have the birth of the three-field system, which was a massive step forward, along with horse collars and heavy ploughs. The beginnings of the modern musical notation system happened smack-bang in the middle of this period. Cast iron was invented in the middle ages. Naval technology was steadily on the improve, from the Vikings in the middle of the period who reached North America, to the end of the period when the Spanish 'discovered' America, and trading vessels were always getting bigger with longer ranges. Social 'technology' like the Magna Carta acted like keystones for formalising and limiting the power of monarchs. Other social technology sees the birth of federated republics, like the Holy Roman Empire. Windmills became common as a cheaper way to grind grain. Horseshoes came into vogue right in the middle of the period - a significant advance. Vaults and buttresses allowed the construction of ever-greater sizes of buildings - and the wheelbarrow to help build them, simple as it seems today, was a middle-ages invention of significance. And, surprisingly, soap was born in this period. The saddle and the stirrup were also widely implemented at this time, allowing cavalry to take a significantly different and powerful role in warfare. The middle east in particular is generally considered to have had its golden period during this time, a flourishing place of learning and technological advancement. Admittedly I know much less of eastern technological development, but certainly in the middle east and europe, it wasn't stagnant. So sure, if technology is "gunpowder", there wasn't much of it in that period (though the same could be said of your armoured cavalry and the period before it). Technology is not "gunpowder" though, and it was continuously undergoing change throughout 500-1500.
amerika_blog 13y ago
War, huh! What is it good for? Evolution, science and philosophy, oh yeah...
ballard 13y ago
Oh, Civilization http://www.civfanatics.com/civ1/manual/civ1_man.htm http://www.civfanatics.com/civ1/manual/civ1_man.htm
teeja 13y ago
That war drove the rise of -empires- seems no surprise at all (see e.g. Alexander). But is that civilization ("An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society") ?? I'm having trouble decoding the semantics to understand why this isn't trivial.
sungx105 13y ago
After reading the paper referenced in the article (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/20/1308825110.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/20/1308825110.abst...), I can only conclude that this is pretty cool work. The authors actually do point out that their sampling method collects data in a way that is independent of the hypothesis they test, so it is not an example of cherry-picking examples that support their ideas. While I cannot comment on how valid the model is because I'm definitely not an expert in that area, it seems pretty solid; they gave neighboring areas the capability to develop military techniques of certain strengths, the capability to lose it, and saw where civilizations tended to develop the different areas would "fight it out" and transfer military technique back and forth, and the result of their simulation appeared to be quite similar to the map of that time period. There was also some talk in the comments about overfitting, and while as a person who works in chemical simulation I understand those concerns, this work seems to involve simply their taking initial conditions and plugging it into their simple simulation, and obtaining a result which was a remarkably good match to the actual world map of the time. I do think the Ars article, like most scientific reporting, restates the conclusion in a way that is a stronger statement than the actual paper. Unfortunately, the way it was said changes the meaning of what was said in a subtle but important way. But.. that's typical scientific reporting, I guess. Overall the work is pretty cool, showing a computational model for studying the spread of military technology in a field that doesn't tend to frequently use computational models (according to the paper).

50 points by llambda 13y ago

chris_mahan 13y ago

Psychohistory?

ninetenel 13y ago
in the seldon plan we trust

ktavera 13y ago

Thomas Sowell wrote a spectacular book in the same vein as this. http://www.amazon.com/Conquests-And-Cultures-International-History/dp/0465014003 http://www.amazon.com/Conquests-And-Cultures-International-H... Extraordinary amount of detail as to why war drives the rise of new civilizations.

lambdasquirrel 13y ago

What about trade? Paul krugman (the economist known for his liberal views) wrote a compelling thesis on the role of transport costs in the rise and fall of manufacturing hubs, etc. It might explain the empires unaccounted for in this model.

diydsp 13y ago

Intriguing concept and neat approach (tower defense anyone?), but many of us perceive civilization as arising much earlier, around 10,500 BCE. Also, I cringe over this statement: "if military technology is removed as a factor, the model’s accuracy falls to a mere 16 percent." That's like saying, "If you take the beans out of my soup, it doesn't taste like potatoes as much."

scotty79 13y ago

> if military technology is removed as a factor, the model’s accuracy falls to a mere 16 percent Imho technology drives culture. Drives our history. History focusing on dates and decisions of individuals or relations between groups of people and their character is bogus narrative. It should focus on technology available and how this technology enabled things to happen. It's often claimed that our technological development outpaced our cultural development. I think that's not the case. Imho only new technology can cause culture to change. If not for development of nuclear weapons we would never could form culture that makes us civilized enough not to use it.

melipone 13y ago
But war drives technology.
- pyre 13y ago
  War is a driver of technology.
- scotty79 13y ago
  War accelerates development of technology same way as science accelerates development of technology same way as commerce accelerates development of technology but new wars and new science and new forms and magnitudes of commerce are possible only because of the new technology (new tools of war, science and commerce to be precise). There are multiple feedback loops like that but common point of all those loops is technology.

vidarh 13y ago

The graphic in the article shows that their model predicts civilizations with the highest likelihood along coasts and major waterways, rapidly declining the further inland you get . It would seem like you could get a similarly inaccurate model by simply modelling people preferring to live by the coast, and only displacing inland when density along the coast gets too high. I'm sure war had a substantial role, but their model doesn't seem to predict anything it couldn't have without considering warfare at all.

btilly 13y ago

Here is my guess. This is not the first iteration of the computer simulation. They keep tuning the simulation until it produces better and better results. But are you getting better results because the simulation is right, or because it was implicitly fit to the historical data? In machine learning terms, their training set and test set are the same, so odds are that the model is bunk.

milesskorpen 13y ago
Could you reasonably investigate this by creating a model for one time period, and then applying it to another time period? Alternatively, train it with one region (say Europe) and then test a second region which is mostly isolated (Americas, if we know enough, or Japan / SE Asia).
- icefox 13y ago
  If your interested in this in more detail I just finished "guns germs and steel" which I would recommend for a enjoyable (to me) overview of old history.
  - yk 13y ago
    In the same genre Ian Morris Why the west rules - for now is also very good. ( And if you did not already read it, Collapse by Diamond.)
- btilly 13y ago
  Yes. But if you're trying to improve the model, only take ideas from training in one region. Never, ever, look at how it failed in the test region because you'll quickly fall in the "overfitting for your data" trap.
tomrod 13y ago
That was my first thought too. But it publishes, I guess.
yk 13y ago
Depends on the model, if they build a model 'from first principles,' whatever that means in history, then they can probably do something interesting. ( Or if they caution themselves enough.) But of course, without actually reading the paper ( ars did link the wrong doi), it is hard to tell what they actually tried to archive or how they build their model.

eksith 13y ago

Are we sure that it was definitively war or merely the availability of resources that gave rise to civilizations? Water, rich soil, minerals (E.G. Iron, Copper, Gold etc...) This sort of modeling is very tricky and, even though I don't want to put down the effort that went into this, I'm not sure if they controlled for other factors. We do know that people started war over these very resources, so it shouldn't be surprising that banding together (I.E. forming societies and by extension, civilizations) was a good way to prevent these from being taken by more powerful adversaries. The technology to defend, seize and improve these resources can also build civilizations so while war may be a factor that is common to it, calling it a cause is a bit of a rush to judgment IMO.

erikig 13y ago

Interesting article, it disnt mention tha there's also a common anthropological hypothesis popularized by Claude Levi Straus that the basis of these wars was inception of the incest taboo: http://m.vice.com/read/the-a-to-z-of-sexual-history-incest http://m.vice.com/read/the-a-to-z-of-sexual-history-incest

crusso 13y ago

I'm so extraordinarily sick of "Computer Simulations <whatever>" being reported with any real credibility as though the Computer Simulation part means accuracy. Sadly, the public can't tell the difference between "Computer Simulations Predict Aerodynamic Qualities of a Porche 911" and "Computer Simulations Show Where Noah's Ark Landed". This article and simulation looks halfway between the two examples above... maybe closer to the Noah's Ark one.

fusiongyro 13y ago
P'shaw, we all know Noah's Ark is up on Mt. Ararat on Armenian land politically owned by Turkey.
- moomin 13y ago
  Well they do if they've read Declare anyway. Not enough people properly appreciate the Kim Philby connection.
malandrew 13y ago
Yup. Computer simulations like many other tools of understanding are at best a lever for the mind. It will multiply feats of both intelligence and stupidity.
vacri 13y ago
It reminds me of those shows that pit ninjas against vikings - "computer simulations show a -foo- would win. We ran it ten times and the ninja won 7 of them!". You've got to have a lot of faith that the designers of the simulation knew what they were talking about in minute detail. Just eyeballing their graphs, I would say their model is doing better at predicting areas weighted by soil fertility and temperate lattitudes. It's missing some giant areas from the data graph. Also, without defining what they mean when they say 'civilisation', it's pretty worthless for any real work.

mumbi 13y ago

I believe it. Competition.

jlgreco 13y ago

I prefer the beer theory. Settling down and growing things doesn't seem like a military tactic that pays off in the short term. Quite the opposite actually... that is probably a great way to get slaughtered. However it does make sense if your objective is to get wasted.

trentmb 13y ago
I suppose, if you completely discount fortifications.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I do, since I am unaware of ancient fortifications as old as the earliest farming communities. Perhaps they did exist, but it seems to me that a farm is a prerequisite for fortifications since fortifications require you to stay in one place for an extended period of time. (Staying in one place requires you to stop following around the herd of whatever you eat. Farms however are much easier to bootstrap. You can plant a field then abandon it, only to come back later). Basically, my understanding is that city walls tended to be built after cities.
  - Ma8ee 13y ago
    The palisade around the village probably came after people had settled there, but I can imagine someone building a wall to have somewhere to go whenever you are attacked, and that place eventually also became the place where people went to trade, thus wall before city.
  - trentmb 13y ago
    Fortifications don't have to be man-made.

frozenport 13y ago

I have trouble with this notion because aboriginal tribes have a history of fighting amongst each other. Perhaps the rise of civilization brought on what the authors consider was war? I also don't understand what predict 65% accuracy means? If we are taking about overlap between two binary variables, this is abysmally low.

jacques_chester 13y ago
Turchin's underlying hypothesis is that "imperiogenesis" occurs at "meta ethnic faultlines". That is: wars between culturally-similar groups don't give rise to this effect. Wars between culturally-dissimilar groups do.

wildgift 13y ago

screw civilization.

johnward 13y ago

I ran my computer simulation (Civ 5) and came to the same conclusion.

jacques_chester 13y ago

Turchin published a book about his theory of the rise of powerful civilisations, and his theory about their decline, called War and Peace and War. I reviewed it here: http://chester.id.au/2012/05/14/review-war-and-peace-and-war/ http://chester.id.au/2012/05/14/review-war-and-peace-and-war... This article covers the creation side. It's worth mentioning that in the book he requires these wars to be between very dissimilar groups. The intense differences create a much nastier competitive dynamic, creating much higher social and cultural pressure. Eventually one group wipes the other(s) out, establishing a new imperial civilisation.

zeteo 13y ago

Maybe this is legit, but 500-1500 CE seems the worst historical period to be testing such models. Neither civilized areas nor technology (except in China) changed much during that period. Models that were accurate for periods such as 3500-2000 BCE or 1500-1900 CE would be much more interesting.

scarmig 13y ago
Where do you get the idea that 500-1500 CE didn't change much? More happened then than 500 BCE - 500 CE, 1500 BCE - 500 BCE, or really any millenium except 1500 CE - 2500 CE.
- zeteo 13y ago
  > Where do you get the idea that 500-1500 CE didn't change much? If we consider military technology, gunpowder had hardly begun to have an impact. Machiavelli's Art of War (1521) still recommends Roman military equipment and methods. Armored cavalry, pikemen, archers dominated the battlefields in 1500 CE; all familiar to Byzantines and Sassanids 1000 years before. And the centers of civilization in the Old World (Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean, India, China) were pretty much established by 300 BCE if not well before that.
  - iskander 13y ago
    What about medicine? The leap from Galen (whose methods dominated Europe for a shockingly long time) to Islamic-era methods was pretty dramatic. You have the invention of modern surgical methods in Cordoba in the 10th century (many still used), use of antiseptics to clean wounds, general elevation of evidence-based methods for pharmacology, rise of teaching hospitals, etc.. Medicine doesn't necessarily shift the borders of empire but it does dramatically affect the quality and duration of a typical person's life. The difference between being born in the 6th century vs. the 11th would (to us) I think be painful brutal existence vs. civilization.
  - vacri 13y ago
    If you define technology as 'gunpowder', then of course not. But technology is far, far more than this. The idea of the 'dark ages' in this time period is generally scoffed at by historians. Like, for example, the number 0. It rose to prominence right in the middle of this period. Or in agriculture, we have the birth of the three-field system, which was a massive step forward, along with horse collars and heavy ploughs. The beginnings of the modern musical notation system happened smack-bang in the middle of this period. Cast iron was invented in the middle ages. Naval technology was steadily on the improve, from the Vikings in the middle of the period who reached North America, to the end of the period when the Spanish 'discovered' America, and trading vessels were always getting bigger with longer ranges. Social 'technology' like the Magna Carta acted like keystones for formalising and limiting the power of monarchs. Other social technology sees the birth of federated republics, like the Holy Roman Empire. Windmills became common as a cheaper way to grind grain. Horseshoes came into vogue right in the middle of the period - a significant advance. Vaults and buttresses allowed the construction of ever-greater sizes of buildings - and the wheelbarrow to help build them, simple as it seems today, was a middle-ages invention of significance. And, surprisingly, soap was born in this period. The saddle and the stirrup were also widely implemented at this time, allowing cavalry to take a significantly different and powerful role in warfare. The middle east in particular is generally considered to have had its golden period during this time, a flourishing place of learning and technological advancement. Admittedly I know much less of eastern technological development, but certainly in the middle east and europe, it wasn't stagnant. So sure, if technology is "gunpowder", there wasn't much of it in that period (though the same could be said of your armoured cavalry and the period before it). Technology is not "gunpowder" though, and it was continuously undergoing change throughout 500-1500.

amerika_blog 13y ago

War, huh! What is it good for? Evolution, science and philosophy, oh yeah...

ballard 13y ago

Oh, Civilization http://www.civfanatics.com/civ1/manual/civ1_man.htm http://www.civfanatics.com/civ1/manual/civ1_man.htm

teeja 13y ago

That war drove the rise of -empires- seems no surprise at all (see e.g. Alexander). But is that civilization ("An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society") ?? I'm having trouble decoding the semantics to understand why this isn't trivial.

sungx105 13y ago

After reading the paper referenced in the article (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/20/1308825110.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/20/1308825110.abst...), I can only conclude that this is pretty cool work. The authors actually do point out that their sampling method collects data in a way that is independent of the hypothesis they test, so it is not an example of cherry-picking examples that support their ideas. While I cannot comment on how valid the model is because I'm definitely not an expert in that area, it seems pretty solid; they gave neighboring areas the capability to develop military techniques of certain strengths, the capability to lose it, and saw where civilizations tended to develop the different areas would "fight it out" and transfer military technique back and forth, and the result of their simulation appeared to be quite similar to the map of that time period. There was also some talk in the comments about overfitting, and while as a person who works in chemical simulation I understand those concerns, this work seems to involve simply their taking initial conditions and plugging it into their simple simulation, and obtaining a result which was a remarkably good match to the actual world map of the time. I do think the Ars article, like most scientific reporting, restates the conclusion in a way that is a stronger statement than the actual paper. Unfortunately, the way it was said changes the meaning of what was said in a subtle but important way. But.. that's typical scientific reporting, I guess. Overall the work is pretty cool, showing a computational model for studying the spread of military technology in a field that doesn't tend to frequently use computational models (according to the paper).