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US Military Builds MMO Earth Simulator

Posted by michael on from the one-is-not-enough dept.

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.'"

23 of 525 comments (clear)

  1. Choose your weapon... by American+AC+in+Paris · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Which do you think will win the War on Terror--guns or minds?

    It makes sense that they'd do this. After all, there have to be a few people at the Pentagon who understand that you can't make people stop hating you at gunpoint, and that they'd do well to have a simulator that allows them to get a feel for the social environments where terrorist organizations have the best luck in recruiting. The more they understand the role society plays in terrorism, the better they'll be able to counteract it.

    Break recruitment, and you're dealing with a handful of international criminals rather than a terrorist network.

    --

    Obliteracy: Words with explosions

    1. Re:Choose your weapon... by BillFarber · · Score: 5, Flamebait
      As somebody who has worked in the Pentagon and with the policy makers (though not one myself), here is a big FUCK YOU to you and your total lack of knowledge as well as to the mods who gave you an insightful. I was in that building during the Clinton admin and the current Bush admin, and it is FULL of people doing their absolute best to protect you and the United States no matter who is in the White House. You may disagree with the admin, or the way the people in the Pentagon do things, but 99% have the best interests of the U.S. in mind.

      How dare you sit at your keyboard and accuse them of being "shadow employees of weapons dealers".

      I say again, FUCK YOU

    2. Re:Choose your weapon... by dave420-2 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Any idiot can kill someone - it takes brains and dedication to talk someone over.

      If the US is fighting for democracy and justice, it has to play by the rules, otherwise its demonstrating a massive love for hypocrisy. Killing people because some people were killed is only going to make things worse. By your logic, there would be peace in the middle east by now.

      Just because it's easy, doesn't make it right. Your argument is very immature, and short-sighted.

      This "war on terrorism" is more than people fighting people, but ideas fighting ideas. You can't shoot an idea.

    3. Re:Choose your weapon... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > you can't make people stop hating you at gunpoint

      Like hell you can't - it's all too easy to make someone stop hating you at gunpoint. Just pull the trigger. It ain't pretty, it ain't nice, it's hard to do thoroughly, but it works despite protests over its obvious brutality.

      Different issue. You can stop someone hating you by killing them, but for every person you kill, more will begin to hate you. The only way to stop people, in the plural, hating you, using violence, is to kill everyone who doesn't support your policy of mass murder. That's not going to do much for the future of the human race.

      That's why the "war on terror" will never be won with military power. Even the evil terrorist bastards you kill were the parents, siblings, or children of someone who will hate you for killing them. And for every evil terrorist bastard we've killed recently, they've also killed or wounded dozens of innocents: how much love do you think they're going to have for us for that?

  2. Gigantic Quake server by Mick+Ohrberg · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh MAN, imagine the MASSIVE deathmatch games you could play! Or even better - BF1942!

    --

    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

    1. Re:Gigantic Quake server by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Funny

      Quake? I want to watch people's faces when the system announces that North Korea has launched a zergling rush.

      --
      One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  3. Deep Thought by Black+Rabbit · · Score: 5, Funny

    Isn't this the flipside of building the Earth 2 to solve the Great Question of Life, The Universe and Everything, for which the answer is 42?

  4. Oh crap by LNO · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hope they don't model my apartment, or else anyone can login and find out where I've hidden my porn.

  5. i wonder the level of detail by millahtime · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder if they will simulate in extreme detail. Like all the nude beaches in Europe or the Playboy mansion. If terrorists attack the Playboy Mansion during a party they have to know how to handle that. If so, I wonder if they are taking resumes.

    --
    Evolution or ID?
  6. The Sims by parawing742 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now if they would just make the earth data available as a plug-in for The Sims, I would never have to leave my computer again!

  7. First of a kind? by thehe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will this make the US the first dual-world superpower in history?

  8. Huh.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    And yet, even with this technology, nothing will beat ACTUAL, REAL experience of the REAL world. No amount of virtual training will compensate for complete lack of awareness of the rest of the world. This is, IMO, the wrong thing to do at this point. We should be giving money and influence for the diplomatic corps so more people actually WANT to do the job.

    If you don't understand another culture, talk to people who do. The gov't ignores those people, and just decides that it will decide things with an imaginary, "faith-based" approach. It doesn't work, guys!

  9. Virtual Wars? by p_millipede · · Score: 5, Funny
    Now all we need to do is convince the world's military, terrorists, militia's etc. (anyone who might be interested) to hold all their confilicts in this virtual world and just let the outcome of virtual wars be accepted as if it had really happened (minus the loss of life).

    Obviously, we'd need to make sure the Americans aren't using cheats. Just imagine the standard procedure before entering combat. Press tilde, type 'AmericaRulesOK 1' followed by '/god', '/allweapons' and '/allammo'

  10. The question is.... by Rican · · Score: 5, Funny

    Would I be able to "create" myself as a Wood Elf Druid chick even though I'm a 250lbs guy in real life?

    --
    Rican

    Want a free iPod?

  11. Re:Psychological impact by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 5, Informative

    Already combat training takes on gaming aspect with tools like the MILES, the classic sandbox and tools like Major H's Tac-Ops

    http://www.battlefront.com/products/tacops4/taco ps 4.html

    "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.

  12. Now we know how it began... by ScottGant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Morpheus said that he didn't know what year it was, but some time early in the 21st century the war with the machines takes place...at least now we know how the Matrix is started.

    Ok, that was an obvious observation. But they're making an online world that mirrors our own world. It reminds me some years back when I went to Siggraph in Chicago and Virtual Reality was the "next big thing". Someone showed a demo on a virtual world where you could walk in, pick up a book and flip through it. Someone remarked wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy a book...

    So wouldn't it be cheaper to build a fake city with actors playing a part for the people being trained to interact in? Be employed by the US Army for acting in a simulated city so they can better understand how to weed out terrorist and help people in need, yet do so in a safe environment. Also, working with actors trained themselves in certain ways AND with the ability to actually "think" would be WAY better than AI in a game.

    Just a thought, but probably a stupid thought on my part.

    --

    "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
  13. Super-accurate physics for...what again? by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "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.'"
    Yes, I expect you do need a lot of super-accurate physics to figure out the various aspects of "human interaction," like....um....well...simulating football games and handing out relief packages. ????

    Maybe they're talking about military tactics or something when they say "human interaction," but to me it seems like they're trying to say "no, really, it's not a military-oriented project." Come on people, this is the Army. If this system is mainly for military purposes, then just come out and say it, ok? Really, we pay you guys to worry about situations that involve "lots of military hardware." There's no need to pretend that you're really trying to solve world hunger or something.
    --
    [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
  14. Ender Wiggin could not be reached for comment. by *weasel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The nastier questions begin at the point at which an 'earth simulator' like this could have the control mechanisms tied to reality unbeknownst to 'pilots' within the sim.

    You thought you were running through the sim... you had no idea you just took a UAV on a live mission and actually killed 2 dozen people. Missions take place, with perfect human guidance - and not even the soldiers involved knew it actually happened.

    Worse yet - consider the game world altering the appearance of targets. Your strike deep in the Tora Bora mountains may have been a cover for an FBI raid on a militant compound in Colorado. The four phillipino terrorists you just greased with an armed unmanned terrestrial rover... well who in the hell were they?

    --
    // "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
  15. Hrm by BenBenBen · · Score: 5, Funny
    The detailed simulation will be drawn from a real-world terrain database and will be drawn to the same scale as the original.
    They're going to need a bloody big monitor.
    --
    The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
  16. Re:Psychological impact by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative
    The first few paragraphs are interesting :-) I've seen some of the s/w the military in the UK was using about 10 years ago when I used to work in the Defence division of Logica. The quality was simply awful. I don't doubt it's MILES better now (pun intended :-) but that doesn't negate that I consider it a problem...

    Gaming doesn't blur the distinction anymore than the training to take orders and it's "Us vs. Them" does for a soldier.


    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!
  17. See you on your own by j0n4th4nb34r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe Violence settles the argument in the short term. But to settle all your arguements your gonna have to kill 6 billion people because for each person you kill your gonna piss 10 more off.

    --

    MacOS X, I've upped my standards, Up Yours...
  18. Best interests? by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Problem is, everyone has a different idea of what "best interests" means. Joe McCarthy certainly had the best interests of the US in mind. So did communists. They just had different best interests.

    J Edgar Hoover had the US best interest in mind when he framed Martin Luther King, Jr with forged audio tapes of bogus conversations.

    McCarthur had the US best interests in mind when he tried to start WW III with Red China.

    The generals who had plans in the early 60s to fake terrorist attacks in the US and blame it on Castro had the US best interests in mind.

    Oliver North had the US best interests in mind.

    Poindextor and TIA had the US best interests in mind.

    I myself don't particularly appreciate other people having my best interests in mind. They don't know my best interests and they don't care.

    And that includes you. To all you and your ilk who have my best interests in mind, I say FUCK YOU, I can decide my own best interests.

    --
    Infuriate left and right
  19. Re:Once again, NOT ON OUR SHORES.... by cherokee158 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think there is a profound misunderstanding of the role of the Pentagon here. The Pentagon does not initiate hostilities. Our elected politicians do. If you don't like war, don't vote for a warmonger. But don't harp on the professionals whose job it is to win wars. Because as soon as some misguided politician starts one, you can be darn sure the best way out of it is to win it.