Modeling Conflict and Competition Far From Equilibrium

The global transition from the industrial age to the information age implies the need for new methods and tools to help us be more agile in the adapting to the new world disorder sketched out by thinkers such as Joshua Cooper Ramo of the Kissinger Institute (“The Seventh Sense”; “The Age of the Unthinkable”). The winners will surf this change the losers will be buried by it.This disruptive disorder is shifting the balance of power in conflict and economics away from slow-to-change over – regulated chain – of – command hierarchies towards self - organizing adaptive networks. We need new economic and conflict models to understand how to be winners and surf the change. The purpose of this book is to develop these new mathematical methods based on the idea of extremal models which originated from my earlier work on conflict modeling. Extremal Models are models of highly entangled and complex systems far from equilibrium which model each entity as simply as possible allowing the system complexity to emerge from the richness of their interactions. I call this approach “Extremal Modeling”.