Technical Note - Stopping Rules for War Games or Combat Simulations with Exponential Life-Times

Abstract : Present war game simulations on computers must be run over and over again many times to get some idea of the outcomes which are sensitive to engineering changes or design objectives for military equipment. Thus, there is a need for stopping rules which will control risks of erroneous judgements in war game simulations or computer games. In view of a new formulation of Lanchester combat theory outlined in a previous paper, and recent related work, it is now possible to formulate stopping rules in terms of hypothesis testing procedures and reliability theory, when games are analyzed in terms of time-to-kill data. Procedures are developed in this report which determine criteria concerning how this may be accomplished for war game simulations with exponential life times. (Modified author abstract)