Under your bruises and scratches, an army of fighter cells begins mobilizing. In the next few minutes to days, these troops will blast apart the body's damaged cells and kill any invading bacteria. Then a follow-up cadre of different troops — thinks of them as the clean-up crew — arrives to tidy up the broken bits and pieces. Finally, medics move in to rebuild and heal the damaged tissue.

Scientists refer to these activities on the body’s battlefields as inflammation. The process is managed by the immune system. They include one of the body's most complex families of cells.

“Let's say that you are a country and you are attacked,” says Gary An. He’s a surgeon and researcher at the University of Chicago, in Illinois. “You would kind of like to only kill the people who are your enemy,” he says. So your immune system drops, what An calls “bombs”, next to the enemy cells. These bombs are chemicals that break apart the problem cells.

But sometimes the bombs accidentally damage healthy cells, too. “You try to minimize that damage as much as you can,” he says. “But the damage needs to be strong enough to kill the invaders.” All too often, he says, this means “You end up destroying parts of your own country. That's kind of what inflammation is.”

When the immune system reacts too much or too little, it can cause many types of disease. Diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's disease and even obesity — all have been linked to inflammation gone wrong.
So scientists like An are trying to find better ways to understand the immune system. To do that, they're borrowing a method pioneered in video games and the movies. It's called agent-based modeling.

Scientists study the process by essentially playing a computer game that attempts to mimic — or “model” — how the body works. They do this by creating virtual cells or “agents” that can interact inside the computer program. Models: How computers make predictions

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