Philip Nuber, director of the Defense Mapping Agency, says that using this virtual technology in flight simulation can help soldiers in peace time as well as war.

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Inside the computer, software that lab members developed visualizes the spiders and determines the physics of spider interactions, creating a simulation of how virtual spiders should behave in the real world, Clark explained.

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In successive rounds each firm battles four others, run automatically by the simulation, to dominate a virtual market.

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Cable in the Classroom's eLECTIONS campaign simulation Make all the decisions for a virtual run for the U.S. presidency, allocating budget, selecting key issues, choosing where to campaign, and responding to the opponent's moves and other external events.

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Maxis had gone down the multiplayer road to make the simulation more realistic by letting cities in the same virtual landscapes share elements such as pollution, crime and resources such as coal, she said.

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Talks are said to have begun with Linden Labs to make the entire simulation available on the internet through the company's virtual world Second Life.

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To do this, you could run a "Monte Carlo simulation" in which you plug historical weather data into a computer and then roll a pair of virtual dice 10, 000 times.

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