A whole lot can be modeled nowadays. The technology to do it isn't very hard to work with, but it is still mostly used in research labs and proprietary software outfits. There are ways to encode what we know about an issue using knowledge models (or ontologies) and perform reasoning on these.
Furthermore, the ability that software can learn and take decisions in blurry situation is today easy to implement, and pretty robust. The days of neural networks are long gone now, thank God. I know a bit about this because I do research in the field and keep on wondering on how this stuff would apply to modeling 4GW (which unfortunately has nothing to do with what the research money is there for).
Take knowledge models and robust learning algorithm and a lot can then be done. As I mentioned before, COIN isn't going to be all that much about the battles, but about the context of these battles. COIN is definitively a setup for an RPG, but software can do now much more than what most game/sim have to offer.
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