substituting for human teams in making high-level decisions. These decisions then directed actions represented in a large global combat model. Different versions of the agents could be substituted (e.g., to reflect a change in government). Agents could run the simulation within itself to test potential strategies with "lookahead." The system was successfully implemented and was used in the late 1980s before the end of the Cold War. As part of the subsequent development, Shaprio co-invented (with H. Edward Hall) a new programming language called Abel (later called RAND-ABEL). This was not the first A.I. style simulation language to look and read like English, but it was clearer and more readable by non-programmers than its predecessors. The main innovation of ABEL was the execution as code of tables that read to the human like any normal table one would find in a magazine article or essay. The ABEL compiler uses these "English" tables in multiple ways: as data values, as a decision tree, or as a complex conditional and value setting function. This was the first time natural language tables have been machine-executed in this manner. Shapiro wrote extensively on databases and privacy, the effects of automation on the court system, the future of automation, and on topics in mathematics, chemistry, and biology. Much of his work is available as full text PDFs at no charge from the publisher, RAND Corporation. References External links List of Norman Z Shapiro's 50 RAND publications ABEL Language Brief Beyond User Friendly Norman Z Shapiro's listing in Microsoft's database of Academic Authors 1932 births 2021 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American logicians University of Illinois alumni Princeton University alumni