Simulating Religious Violence is an 86-minute feature documentary that follows an expert crew of computer scientists and religion scholars on a three-year effort to apply computer simulation and 📝Multi-Agent AI (MAAI) modeling to one of the hardest problems there is: predicting and preventing religious radicalization and violence. Called to action by the Boston Marathon Bombing and a rise in extremist attacks across North America and Europe, the team builds cutting-edge models out of research centers in Boston and Virginia and at the University of Agder, then travels to refugee camps in Lesvos, Greece to ground their simulations in the connections between extremism and the refugee crisis. The film carries the logline "Program it. Predict it. Prevent it." and was produced, directed, filmed, and edited by Jenn Lindsay, with music by Xurxo Romanì. It documents the modeling work that grew out of the Modeling Religion Project and the 📝Center for Mind and Culture era — the same line of research that led to the founding of 📝CulturePulse. You can learn more at https://simulatingreligionfilm.com/.
What I appreciate about how the film treats this work is that it doesn't pretend the science is tidy: building agent-based models of belief and identity is one thing, but saving lives in the real world turns out to be much harder than the math suggests. That tension — between what a simulation can show you and what a policy can actually change — is the heart of the story, and it's the question I'm still chasing in everything I build.