| Diagnosing International Political Systems |
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| Han and Tang China stand with the Roman Empire in the minds of modern man as the standards of imperial hegemony over international political systems, each essentially controlling its world. Thus, these three are fair cases for the application of a political science methodology designed to evaluate the health of an international political system. The Latin and Chinese "international political systems" at their heights provide examples of systems that appeared destined to survive forever. The history of these systems also contains earthshaking events that generated stresses of the most fundamental kind--the collapses into chaos and civil war, invasions, and fundamental shifts in style, reach, and quality of government at the end of the Han, end of the Tang, and end of the Western Roman Empire. In brief, military force rather than the legal system or the negotiating table apparently came to be the method of choice for resolving conflict, and--simultaneously--the health of these systems appears to have declined. This essay applies to these ancient international political systems a typology of features previously developed for evaluating the health of any self-aware biological system. This essay then develops some initial metrics for diagnosing those systems' state of health. These great imperial systems offer themselves as "laboratories" for testing political science theory. The ancient historians may have thought somewhat differently from modern political scientists, but they were probing thinkers, frequently conscious of the stresses their societies were undergoing even as these stresses emerged during their own lifetimes. They could see the needless aggravation of these stresses, the confusion of symptoms with causes, the prescription of irrelevant and outright harmful solutions. The luster of their wisdom has not tarnished even after all these years. |
| Comparing Human Social Systems |
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| This article proposes a set of features designed to permit the high-level description and comparison of systems. It further defines a measurement scheme and describes software to implement the comparison. Accompanying software for performing cross-system analysis includes a test dataset of a sampling of highly disparate systems. The article proposes some preliminary hypotheses about the behavior of biological systems based on this dataset. |
| System 101 |
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| System 101 implements a nearest neighbor matching algorithm specifically for systemic-level comparisons by having the feature set built in. It also contains a test data set and thus constitutes an introductory electronic tool for the study of systems. |
| Use Computers for Creativity, Not Speed! |
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| Computers have traditionally been used as tools to raise efficiency. To realize the true value of computers, one should view them as tools to enhance human creativity. Nearest-neighbor matching, knowledge-based systems, and machine induction--and, most of all, complexity science--are examples of technologies or, in the case of complexity science, new ways of thinking that can now be used by social scientists to analyze data and identify patterns of behavior. These analytical techniques are based on human cognitive models but work in ways that have important differences--complementing the way humans think and thereby extending their analytical abilities--enabling social scientists to work not just faster but smarter. |
| Dynamic Model of International Relations |
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| A dynamic model of Sino-Soviet rapprochement is presented providing statements about the critical indicators made in advance and in falsifiable format. This model predicts the sequence of events that could be expected if Sino-Soviet rapprochement were to occur on the basis of a definition of the concept of interstate amity. The model offers a more systematic way of judging the state of relations between two estranged states than was formerly available. |
| Case-Based Reasoning about International Relations |
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| Innovative computational modeling techniques such as rule-based reasoning, case-based reasoning, and explanation-based learning are now becoming practical tools to assist researchers and analysts studying international relations. Case-based reasoning--which requires only descriptive cases rather than solid theory as the basis for its reasoning about historical precedent--is particularly well suited to the theory-poor field of international relations. Case-based reasoning offers the critical advance over database querying of finding cases (records) that are similar rather than identical to the current scenario (query). |
| Expert Systems to Teach International Relations |
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| Expert systems are a valuable classroom technique to encourage clear thinking about international relations. The value comes mostly from leading students through the process of designing expert systems, which forces students to make explicit the rules by which they intuitively draw conclusions and facilitates reproduceability and modifications for retesting. The process of defining enough rules to build an expert system capable of analyzing an event will reveal to students the complexity of international relations and will elicit a degree of expertise they did not know they possessed. |
| Expert System to Evaluate Sino-Soviet Negotiating Sessions |
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| A rule-based computational model designed to analyze Sino-Soviet negotiating sessions is presented as both a practical tool for rapidly assessing a new negotiating session and as an example of how the field of artificial intelligence can be applied to international relations. |
| Rules, Cases, and Induction for Social Science Research |
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| Computer scientists studying the automation of analytical techniques based on human cognitive processes have in recent years developed several innovative methodologies well suited to social science research, e.g., rule-based analytical tools, databases that return information that is "similar" to that requested, and inductive classification of examples. This article describes software designed to introduce these methods and show how they can be applied to social science problems. |
| Integrating Rules and Cases into a Analytical Tool for Social Science Research |
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| Only substantive experts, not computer experts, can accomplish the necessary adaptation of automated analytical methods necessary to create analytical tools that will actually solve complex, real-world social science problems. This principle is illustrated with a Prolog program for analyzing Sino-Soviet relations that integrates rule-based and case-based methods. Such emphasis on integration of techniques offers the hope of overcoming the frustrating slow progress in devising robust automated analytical tools. |