About
The Tangled Info website was created and is maintained by Dale K. Brearcliffe. Its purpose is to document my academic interests, past and future. I finished my PhD in Computational Social Science (CSS) at George Mason University (GMU) in December 2024 with a dissertation titled, "Computational Military Science: Complexity, Broken Symmetry, and Artificial Intelligence." There is no modelling, unlike my master's thesis, and instead focused on theory. In short, my theory is that complexity sciences can be applied to the organizational structure of a military unity to provide a mathematical measurement that can be compared to other military units. I also provided a chapter on Large Language Models, forecasting how they would impact military simulations and actual conflict in the near and far future.
I finished my master's degree in CSS in December 2017. In my thesis, "Parallelization of Entity-Based Models in Computational Social Science: A Hardware Perspective" I examine how hardware, the underlying foundation of any computational simulation, affects modeling when you are attempting to scale up using parallel computing.
For a definition of CSS I'll pull from my thesis:
Computational Social Science is an interdisciplinary field in which mathematics is used computationally to explore social science questions and answer social science problems. CSS encompasses a number of computational approaches of which one is modeling. Agent-based models (ABM) and individual-based models (IBM) are the predominant modeling systems used by CSS.
You can find more information on the master's degree and the PhD program on the GMU website.
My prior education was a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from California State University Hayward (since named California State University East Bay). That degree was received in 1983, so things have changed a bit.
My current research interests include computer modeling of people (agent-based modeling) and animals/insects/plants (individual-based modeling), parallel processing, and Large Language Models.
You may contact me at dbrearcl@gmu.edu.