HN user
Didn't Joseph Stiglitz publish a book with similar ideas earlier?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Inequality-Divided-Endangers...
I'm just surprised people would pay so much more attention to this young French professor than an MIT Nobel laureate and former top-level economic adviser to the Clinton admin and to the World Bank.
I was tasked to create an AI for a simulation war game similar to Command & Conquer (but way more realistic).
At the highest level the engine is based on Hierarchical Task Networks (HTN) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_task_network). Primitive actions like Move and Fire can be compounded into higher level commands like Sustain Cover Fire or Setup Ambush. These are recursively aggregated into even higher level directives like Attack Enemy Position. All commands have pre- and post-conditions, and the AI engine stitches together a sequence of commands under the current constraints (eg using Charge Hill instead of Charge Building when Attack Enemy is specified on a knoll instead of a building, you need to Setup Ambush on an incoming road if expecting enemy reinforcement).
At the lowest level, I had to implement detailed algorithms for pathfinding (easy, but consider different terrain, on-road, etc), line-of-sight (actually pretty hard due to time constraints and size of map) for locating best vantage points, etc. Implementing fuzzy conditions are tricky, eg the idea of 'threat' where a unit knows it is outnumbered by a superior force (when is an enemy unit relevant? based on distance? what if it's currently engaged against an allied unit? Can you get threat from one direction but not the other? what if the enemy can't see you?)
The hardest part about this was actually getting the domain experts to write the heuristics using my script editor. These army guys don't think like programmers at all! Even getting them to encode their decision process using simple If-Then-Else was an insurmountable challenge in mental gymnastics. :(
Still it was fun. As it turns out, it was used to train actual army commanders in a small foreign country. :)