The book that you-kind reader-are holding in your hand represents a labor of love, in the purest sense, for most of the five-and-a-half years that it took to write; and the additional five years that, because of various setbacks and self-imposed periods of inactivity, it took me to struggle through in order to have it finally see the light of day. In the time that the book has matured from a vague but interesting idea-first brought up by the author's thesis advisor while waiting for dessert to arrive during a casual luncheon-to its final unintentionally massive form, I have myself evolved dramatically from an idealistic, 28-year-old, sadly underpaid graduate physics student to a husband, father and senior defense analyst working for a naval think-tank,* currently developing one of the first cellular-automata-based artiuci&l-life simulations of combat. I would like to briefly share a few personal
notes about how this book came to be.