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US Military Builds MMO Earth Simulator
transient writes "BBC reports that the US military is creating a second Earth with help from There. At the moment, only Kuwait City has been modeled, but the ultimate goal is to model the entire Earth using existing terrain data and a super-accurate physics model. While combat will be part of the game, 'the emphasis in the artificial Earth will be on human interaction rather than conflicts involving lots of military hardware.'"
You mean like this story here?4 /02/18/ 2330228/ 01/16/ 1951256
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0
Which talked about stuff from here
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04
Already combat training takes on gaming aspect with tools like the MILES, the classic sandbox and tools like Major H's Tac-Ops
o ps 4.html
http://www.battlefront.com/products/tacops4/tac
"TacOps 4 is the commercial version of "TacOpsCav 4", an officially issued standard training device of the US Army. It is a simulation of contemporary and near-future tactical, ground, combat between United States (Army and Marine), Canadian, New Zealand/Australian and German forces versus various opposing forces (OPFOR), simulating the Former Soviet Union, China, North Korea etc. Various civilian units and paramilitary forces are also included."
Gaming doesn't blur the distinction anymore than the training to take orders and it's "Us vs. Them" does for a soldier.
Since 1942 the US Army has trained at Ft. Irwin in wargames. Commanders already see the theatre of operations as a game, thats how they deal with the massive amounts of people, equipment and casualties they will deal with. At the lower level, situtations have been gamed for hundreds of years and numerical values have been established to units, ships and fortifications have been in use since at least the 1750s.
Not just Borges. Lewis Carroll and Umberto Eco have also written about a map of the world on a 1:1 scale.
I discussed this with folk a little while ago, here
I disagree. If you join up, you know the risks involved. There are many reasons for someone to join the armed forces, but fundamentally everyone knows the deal. You do as you're told. You might get killed. You might have to kill others. That's no real problem for a human - the veneer of civilisation is a very thin one, and we can easily regress into the 'kill or be killed', 'fight or flight' primitive responses. No problems there.
If however, you start to present these lethal environments as a game, you're making a flank attack on the soldier's psyche. You're saying "this isn't real", when it patently is. You're lowering the barriers for doing things that even soldiers do not do. ("Shall we waste the villagers ?", "Sure why not, let's see what happens"). People do things in games that they would never countenance in real life, even in real-life battle, even if it's simply to see what the programmers have in store for you if you do...
Your last paragraph is talking about game-theory. I have no problem with viewing a conflict using game-theory - this is a mathematical model to count losses and victories, a way to count the cost; I'm all-for ways to count the cost.
Using game-theory is very different from treating war as a game, one is a deplorable attitude, the other is responsible accounting. Troops die in war, and you may sacrifice company A so that B,C,D all get through. Fine, this is war. Sorry they died, but it was necessary. Unless you have a cost model, you can't even say it was necessary...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The point of military tactics has always been to let the other guy die for *his* country.
Or would you prefer we fight w/ no clue as to what we're doing. Is a bloodbath preferable?
http://www.there.com/sanfranciscochronicle.html
Regarding all the talk of "get Bush out of the office, and make the world a better place." While Bush does need to go ASAP, projects such as this Earth simulator necessitate understanding of a finer point: Technological Inertia.
Just becuase we can do something, does not mean that we should. We ought to categorically oppose all technology used for the sake of automated control (red light cameras, airport profile scanning, etc). Unfortuantely, because we can do it, we do it anyway... obsessive-compuslively sticking our fingers in the electric socket despite conditioned responses warning us otherwise. As the Beatles said in Yellow Submarine "I can't help it I'm a born lever puller."
Slowly this automated control enters and enters and we adjust and become accustomed... and whether or not Bush is in office doesn't matter, for we have already become a prisoner in our own minds and houses.
The Custom Mary
Read this - a press release from the US army STRICOM dated Nov. 19th. 2003 - there was probably some other US coverage at that time. The article's a bit more informative than the beeb one actually, as it shows the size of the There contract ($3.5m - which I guess puts it as something between 6mo. and a year, depending on the team size - its interesting that There haven't even put a press release about it), and that the Army are funding this speculatively - there is no group that actually wants this for training yet.
The beeb is reporting it because they read the article on Homelan Fed last week. There's more coverage here
I noticed that if you go to www.there.com with Mozilla 1.6 and click the "Free Trial" button it loads the page correctly and then quickly takes you to a page explaining that you must use Internet Exporer. If you press the stop button before the refresh the page will show up just fine.
The bad thing is that the McAfee site requires MSIE. I was helping my brother try to rid his computer of tons of adware so we naturually go there only to be refused since we were currently using Firefox.
It's like McAfee doesn't want to do business with you if you aren't running a well-tested virus vector.
mbbac
Of very related interest is http://vterrain.org , a great open source terrain modelling. It uses remote sensing and geomatics data. It is also related to http://www.openplans.org/, the Open Planning project.
Animoog.org
You got the quote wrong...
The correct quote is "violence never solves anything".
Violence may wipe people off the face of the earth but it does not solve problems. Sure rome destroyed carthage but their politics never let them have
long-term peace and the cost of their military might eventually bankrupted them.
While the Republic of Venice did fight some wars their politics allowed them to find solutions that were much less costly than wars. Venice as a small state still lasted over a thousand years from the height of byzantium to the coming of Napoleon.
Al Qaeda is not fighting to put sharia in place, they are fighting to "liberate" oppressed Muslims that the US has been hurting for years.
They want the US troops out of Saudi Arabia and the other muslim countries, and to stop supporting oppressive governments in the Muslim world. You can't overthrow a dicatator if the US is giving said dictator weapons and diplomatic legitimacy.
They aren't doing it to oppress women. I think most people really don't understand the issues, and your statement is an ignorant one like most others. Terrorists dont "hate us because of our freedoms," they hate us because we're acting in our own interests at the expense of theirs. So what if Musharraf is a dictator to his people, he's helping us. Pakistanis are really ticked off now.
Historically, Islam has been far more tolerant of other religions than has Christianity. The intellectual freedom enjoyed by the Islamic world meant that they preserved the great works of antiquity, like Plato and Aristotle, while christians abandoned them because of their pagan origin. Up until this century, Muslems, Christians and Jews lived together relatively successfully. The current violence and disorder is more a product of the end of colonialism than religious differences.