| After reading the paper referenced in the article (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). |