Modeling Conflict and Competition Far From Equilibrium

The disruptive 'new world 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 this 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'. This book is dedicated to Per Bak, friend and colleague, whose untimely death robbed us all of a great mind.