[Consim-l] Analysis of Coral Sea

[Mike NotSpecified]

Karl makes a very good point, I also noticied that the researchers built their 
model on the first assumption that the historical outcome was average.  I 
think we tend to do that with our wargames as well, achiving the historical 
outcome is usually a minor victory, a major vicotry often requires 
out-performing history by a wide margin.

The researchers were pleased that the historical outcome seemed to lie in 
about the middle of range of outcomes their model produced, an exercise in 
circular reasoning as that is how they built the model.

I'm not sure how you'd do it, but I would be more impressed by building a 
model based on how you expect things to work, then running it and seeing if 
the historical outcome ever appears.  If it never appears than your model is 
wrong, but if it does appear, even way out on one tail of the bell curve, then 
you might have something.  For instance, I'd assume historical Midway was not 
an "average" outcome at all.  It might not be truly a "miracle", but certainly 
it was a better than expected victory for the US


On Sat, 18 Nov 2006 11:18:28 +0100
  Karl Moens <karl.moens at telenet.be> wrote:
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> A very interesting article and two things were very notable:
> 
> 1. Indeed --as Mike already noted-- the mechanisms in our humble
> wargames seem at least as good (if not better) as the models used in
> these academic studies;
> 
> 2.The offense is much more favored over the defense, so perhaps indeed
> "The bomber always gets through" as B.H. Liddell Hart once stated.
> 
> One other thing which struck my mind is that the model used in this
> study is very "plain", i.e. it has few "real world" variables and the
> introduction of the "stochastic" element is heavily dependent on the
> standard deviation which was rather arbitrarily set to 1/3. Whether this
> has any basis in "real life" is anybody"s guess.
> 
> Also the "statistics" used to calculate the number of planes that made
> it to the target and the probabilities of a successful intercept of
> those planes that made it that far are just based on this one battle
> only, whereas no-one actually knows if the actual outcome of this one
> battle was something "average" or perhaps something totally one on or
> the other side of the spectrum of all possible outcomes.
> 
> 
> Karl
> 
> Mircea Pauca wrote:
>>     Even 'official' analysts can be almost
>> like gamers ;-) An article especially of interest
>> for Markus Stumptner - calibrating a Salvo
>> combat model to the Battle of Coral Sea:
>> http://www.carleton.ca/csds/working_papers/ArmstrongWP03.pdf
>>     By that theory, most of our games use
>> stochastic Salvo models, right ?
>> especially 'fistful of dice' systems, War at Sea,
>> Victory in the Pacific etc.
>> 
>>     Thank you for thinking about this,
>>     Mircea Pauca, Bucuresti, Romania
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