SOMAModels of the Behaviors of Stakeholders in the Afghan Drug Economy: A Preliminary Report

Most cultural reasoning today is done by anthropologists and sociologists who use their detailed knowledge of culture to make predictions about how a given group will respond to a given situation. The main problem with this is that experts in a particular culture or subculture are few and not readily accessible to the many who might suddenly need to tap their expertise (e.g. in cases of war or conflict). In this paper, we briefly describe how the SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents) paradigm proposed by the authors can and has been used to model the behaviors of various stake-holders in the drug trade in Afghanistan.