What is it about?
Effective one-on-one fighting and effective warfare were a matter of life and death, especially in the unsettled times before our peaceful era. Becoming effective meant practicing in simulations, and the article looks at the different simulation and training set-ups through history.
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Why is it important?
We apply a check-list of four criteria to each simulation set-up: Does the simulation test quantity, quality, time, and/or information? We look at chess, the "verdadera destreza", the Prussian war-gaming, and duelling, among other situations. As it turns out, only fencing is able to truly test timing, which may explain why lethal duelling with blades among officers was tolerated, even encouraged by Continental armies.
Perspectives
One of the issues were were interested in: How did our forebears who designed the simulations view reality? The change in the conception of reality over time was very interesting, and unexpected. We expected to find, in the 19th century, a reflection of the cultural juxtaposition rationality/romanticism. Instead, we found a dead-end deterministic view of reality, opposed to a difficult, but "realistic" probabilistic view of reality (exemplified by Clausewitz), anticipating the conflicts in physics a century later.
Dr. Jürg Gassmann
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mos geometricus v. Reality: Quantity, Quality, Time and Information in Combat Simulations since the Middle Ages, Acta Periodica Duellatorum, July 2019, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.2478/apd-2019-0004.
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