From a software testing perspective, what quality-analysis tests would justify using a single world-war simulation?

The Perspective: My story is told from the perspective of the simulated AI. In other words, The AI's world is influenced by the reason the developers chose to use a world-spanning war to test the software. This is why this is a worldbuilding question: it affects the rules of the AI's world.

The Premise: Hardware and software has advanced to the point that accurate simulation of large numbers of human minds on common desktop computers is possible. As with any software, the AI simulations have preprogrammed memories and personalities. They are therefore unaware of the "real world."

For testing purposes, the developer has created a simulated world war. He has access to a single avatar controlled by him, it is the only interaction between the simulation and the real world.

Question: From a software testing perspective,¹ what quality-analysis tests would justify using a single world-war simulation? For clarification I mean world-war to mean a war at the scale of a world war and not necessarily a war involving simulated variants of irl factions.

The best answer will consider the following:

• The solution needs to be compact: as many issues are tested and resolved as possible.

• The solution needs to be credible: stress-testing the simulation framework to prove the most robust operation over the shortest period of testing time.

• In an effort to avoid being too broad: only the software framework is being tested, not the hardware or any other aspect of the software.

• The software will be marketed as a piece of homebrew freeware software. Therefore the end user is unknown.

• The developer is a 20 year old amateur at general software development. They also invented AI and are working alone. Suspension of disbelief is needed here.

• The test needs to determine the stability of the AI (whether or not an unintended chronic "mental illness" exists in the population).

• The test needs to determine the stability of the mechanics of the world the AI inhabit.

• The test needs to determine whether the AI will notice any discontinuity between the memories formed in the simulation and their preprogrammed memories.

• The test should determine the stability of the major preprogrammed factions present in the simulation and whether or not they begin to disband and fall apart after the simulation starts.

• Magic exists in this simulated world. Therefore real world physics need not apply and they don't. I would describe it as likely having something similar to video game physics.

My primary issue is that I do not personally see any benefit of triggering a war among the inhabitants of the simulation to test full system stability (existence of glitches) over just letting it run for the same amount of time and observing whether or not some emergent behavior develops that may or may not be undesirable (such as two factions having too large of an intelligence gap and therefore one faction being "overpowered" in comparison).

_{¹ Software testing is the process of setting up one or more tests to determine whether or not the software works as intended and handles normal user or system interaction. For more information, please follow the link.}

posted about 6 years ago

The Great Duck‭

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