Virtual UrbanWargamer

This is a demonstration of a virtual replica, based on me and my PhD research on wargaming urban warfare. Virtual UrbanWargamer has been provided with access to most of my public research and most of my draft thesis. The bot has two conversational modes - "informal", the default where it just chats and "formal" where it behaves more formally as though it was being examined in a viva, and keeps responses shorter (as in human conversation) and provides more references to back up what it is saying. Just say "change mode to X" to change.

Just click on this link to open it.

Possible things you can talk about include:

• the topic of my PhD
• my research approach and progress for the PhD
• the validity of wargames
• the elements of urban warfare
• how different elements of urban warfare are represented in urban wargames
• how civilians and civilian harm is reflected in wargames
• how wargames relate to the "just war" concept
• what urban wargames I have created
• what are some good urban wargames
• the role of conversational AI in wargaming, and the military in general
• the concept of mixed reality wargaming
• my approach to game design
• my approach to critiquing games
• the history of urban warfare
• the growth in urbanisation and its implications for warfare
• how urban doctrine has evolved over the years
• how the historiography of urban warfare has evolved over the years
• what are the most informative urban battles
• what are the most useful resources on urban warfare

The bot has access to around 40 PDFs - but does retrieve information in a fairly broad way some so of the detail and nuance is lost. I'll be working to improve this during 2Hq26. Note that the current version is powered by CalStudio/Claude. Earlier versions used Sensay (til Jan 26), and ChatGPT (Jan 26 - Jun 26). The current version does not have a personalised voice font or access to my Obsidian note repository/second brain.

I'd love to know how you get on with the bot - I currently can't see the chat history so I'll have no idea as to how well it's doing! This tech is still in its early days, and I'm always interested in how to improve the replica.