Using Games To Predict Terrorist Actions?

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Using Games To Predict Terrorist Actions?

Posted by simoniker on Thursday February 26, 2004 @12:18AM from the disturbing-or-enlightening? dept.

Thanks to Popular Science for its feature article discussing the opportunities for using game-based simulations to predict the actions of "allies, enemies and even terrorists." The article explains: "The need for sim Qaeda agents is taking modelers down strange paths. The team at Moves [creator of the America's Army recruiting game] is trying to model the behavior and thinking of terrorists by creating a series of computer characters to populate a model code-named Iago, after Shakespeare's arch villain." However, Will Wright, creator of The Sims, injects a note of caution with regard to the general concept, pointing out: "As you scale up to larger and larger systems, you can probably model large trends... But what the Iraqi resistance will do over the next month is based on thousands of tiny local factors that seem to always be in flux and to be too granular to be modeled."

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Didn't We See This Already? by fuzzybunny · 2004-02-26 00:28 · Score: 4, Insightful

...in the form of a geopolitical futures market?

It strikes me as interesting, trying to predict the actions of homicidal fanatics through whatever mechanism, be it something like this, which is essentially an extended human brainstorming, or through methodical, automated risk analysis.

It could be interesting to bring completely unrelated individuals' ideas into play, to see what someone pretty random with violence on their mind might go for (I mean, I'm sure that _someone_ uninformed would have come up with the idea of ramming planes into an office tower) but I would always be aware of a few caveats:

- Most people who would play something like this think differently (basic cultural mindset and all that) than a mad bomber from a middle eastern country (or Iowa for that matter)
- There's a danger of coming up with a lot of purely hypothetical red herrings--as anyone who works in security and who has ever held a brainstorming session to determine potential avenues of attack can tell you (no, it's not realistic that the Martians will attack with death ray spaceships, although it is conceivable)
- The more factors are considered in putting together a "risk" big picture (such as having a ton of online gamer geeks come up with ideas to blow up as many civilians as possible in one go), the greater is the human propensity to see said big picture as "authoritative".

That said, if it's just used as a tool to model potential avenues of attack, not a bad way of going about it.

--
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
1. Re:Didn't We See This Already? by Ath · 2004-02-26 02:21 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I disagree a bit about this. I think it is wishful thinking to conclude that someone who follows a "normal" life and does not have homicidal tendencies could think of unpredictable ways to initiate terrorist acts.
  
  For example, I believe it was a commission in 2000 (chaired by, I think, Paul Bremer) that warned of the use of airplanes as missiles to attack targets inside the USA.
  
  Will Wright's point about granular details being too hard to model is only valid to a certain point and depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to model a world that predicts terrorist behavior, it seems we are far away from such abilities. If you are trying to model a world that gives a lot of freedom and capabilities to individuals, I think the real individuals will eventually demonstrate new and creative ways to do things.
  
  I see a real danger here in that those individuals who can think in such creative ways would be branded as "high risk" individuals. There are a lot of people who assume you are dangerous merely based on your ability to think of violent behavior. The next step in this approach is that if you are willing to engage in such violent behavior in a virtual setting, you are more inclined to engage in the same behavior in the real world.
  
  People have their own conclusions about whether any of that is true. Personally, the idea that virtual behavior or mind thoughts demonstrate a higher likelihood of such behavior is a little tough to accept. I can personally say that I have thoughts, fantasies and ideas that I would never initiate in the real world for a variety of reasons. I would never accept that I am a high risk individual because I think of such things. Of course some crimes are inevitably preceded by fanatasies about it. For example, rapists probably play out rape fantasies in their head before committing actual rapes. But going the other direction and establishing causation that all people who fanatasize about rape are potential rapists (or even inevitable rapists) is a bit ridiculous by most common sense measures.
  
  The other risk is that such a modeled environment would also allow individuals who truly do have a propensity towards such behavior to practice their acts before engaging in them, even perfecting their plans. It is one thing to accept the benefits of pilot schools even when they are abused into training centers for terrorists. It is quite another to intentionally set up an environment where wannabe terrorists are given the tools for practicing terrorism, even if the goal is to prevent the behavior in real life.
  
  Perhaps we could have a questionnaire at the beginning. Question 1: Are you a terrorist? Only those who answer no are allowed in the game.
2. Re:Didn't We See This Already? by fuzzybunny · 2004-02-26 02:30 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Disagree? You're agreeing with me! That was part of my whole argument :)
  
  To clarify; what I meant to say was that it's dangerous to rely on information generated by this sort of a mechanism as in any way complete or authoritative, as people who'd be involved in it (slashdot geeks?) probably have their brains wired different ways from some Pakistani religious student seeking an express ticket to see his 70 doe-eyed virgins and take as many of us corrupt, decadent infidel scum as possible with him in the process.
  
  Rather, it'd be interesting to see what comes out of it, as no more than one of many forms of input or analysis. Hence my use of the word "brainstorming". The idea being that you will almost certainly not cover all the bases, but some novel approaches will inevitably result when you have a whole bunch of people not coming from (a) a terrorist or (b) an intelligence or government background thinking, "hmm, how would _I_ commit terrorist acts?" as a purely academic process.
  
  Whether or not this would come up with anything really useful, whether one could separate the really feasible ideas from the chaff, and how much credibility one should assign to such ideas is left as an exercise for the reader.
  
  --
  Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
3. Re:Didn't We See This Already? by Oddly_Drac · 2004-02-26 03:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  "I think it is wishful thinking to conclude that someone who follows a "normal" life and does not have homicidal tendencies could think of unpredictable ways to initiate terrorist acts."
  
  Not if you're walking the problem as an abstract rather than getting into the emotive points of 'terrorism', such as just positing the question 'How do I cause the maximum disruption and loss of life with the minimum of resources'.
  
  No matter what your upbringing or desires, that problem can produce some interesting results, and I already have my money down on a couple of possible future possibilities.
  
  However, there is a slight problem when you start skewing your data because you fundamentally misunderstand the problem, such as making all your decisions based upon being the median group in a given environment, or assuming that playgroups are tactically 'out of bounds' or that _anything_ should be disallowed.
  
  Personally I've always thought that things like this are better kept to mixed focus groups and think tanks, but the current state of administration in the western world has made terrorism (state sponsored and otherwise) a 'thoughtcrime', simply because 'normal' patterns of behaviour aren't supposed to include thinking about ways to bring a nation to it's knees.
  
  --
  Oddly Draconis
  Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
Psico-history? by BRSloth · 2004-02-26 00:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

That reminds me the excellent "Fundation" series by Isaac Asimov. In that book, there was a man that created a new research line called "psico-history". That research allow him to say what would happen in the future by using statistics over a large group of people, and the predictions only worked on large groups, not on individuals. Someting like "a group will always work in some ways, but an individual will work randomly".

It seems that we are seeing the born of psico-history, using games.
1. Re:Psico-history? by geekboy2k · 2004-02-26 03:33 · Score: 1
  
  I have often thought about this - using game theory and weather forcasting-type algorithms to predict future scocial/economic patterns. Sounds interesting. Of course I know nothing about weather forecasting and very little of game theory, so this may not be possible.
People will *always* resist a Police State. by torpor · 2004-02-26 00:39 · Score: 0, Flamebait

And that is all that America is good at creating.

Simulate away, but the desire for personal freedom is never going to be something you can quantize into a dataset.

--
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
1. Re:People will *always* resist a Police State. by 0x0d0a · 2004-02-26 02:16 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I can't agree.
  
  I'm disturbed about how *close* to a police state the United States is getting -- I think that the line beyond which I am not happy has been crossed.
  
  What is being done in Iraq is not pretty, and is on par with other hostile occupations (and is rather different from situations where a leader is simply ousted, which puts the lie to Bush's current claim "we just wanted to get rid of Hussein".)
  
  However, despite me wanting it to move more towards individual freedoms,the United States is most definitely not a police state, and is in fact freer than most countries in the world.
  
  --
  May we never see th
2. Re:People will *always* resist a Police State. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 02:42 · Score: 0
  
  The United States is already a police state and has been that way since pre-WWI. The reason we are is because no one else is willing to take up the job. Sure theres the U.N. but that was formed post-WWII and it takes some serious proding (read: shoving) in order to force them into action.
  Until the U.N. steps up to the job sooner and without U.S. intervention, face it. The U.S. is gonna be forced into being the police officer of the world. If the U.S. was to back down, how many dictators do you think would still be in power? Hussein being the most obvious example. The Soviet Union might not have collapsed. WWIII might've become a reality without the rebuilding of Europe and Japan in post-WWII. Hell if the U.S. didn't enter WWII, do you think the allies woulda won?
3. Re:People will *always* resist a Police State. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 03:46 · Score: 0
  
  The phrase "police state" does not mean what you think it means.
4. Re:People will *always* resist a Police State. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 05:01 · Score: 0
  
  I love it how you enter WWII at the end, then claim that you won it. Then because your country is not destroyed, you act high and mighty for helping rebuild the other countries (some of which you dropped nuclear bombs on). Also this is not what they mean when they are talking about police state.
5. Re:People will *always* resist a Police State. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 05:09 · Score: 0
  
  The Soviet Union would have collapsed without US intervention. It was never a stable entity, and it rode the edge of collapse from the day it was formed until the day it died - and indeed did collapse several times - and it's former member nations are still not stable.
  
  The US did not intervene in forign politics before WWI, and didn't enter WWI until victory was almost assured for the allies. Germany's army had litterally run out of gas several months before the US entered the war, the Ottoman empire had been defeated, and Austria surrendered on the east front about the same time the US was landing troops in France.
  
  In WWII, our part was not critical in Europe, either. Germany had already had it's naval and air power crippled by Britain, and was loosing territory on three fronts - and in full route on two of those - before Pearl Harbor, and it never recovered. Japan is a different matter, though, they hadn't suffered a major defeat before the US entered the war.
  
  In case you don't know your history, the UN is actually fairly good at responding. The UN had to shove the US pretty hard to get them to wake up and enter the war in Korea, it took everything short of threats to get us to lift a finger in most of the conflicts we've been involved with this century (Vietnam and the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq being the only counterexamples), and the US refused to get involved in many, many cases far worse than anything Hussien can cook up.
  
  The UN wanted the US to get involved in a certain country in Africa which slaughtered its citizens, had attempted several times to deploy biological weapons on people within its borders and outside, had nuclear weapons at one point, and still has the ability to build them, and had a chemical weapons stockpile exceeded only by the US and Russia.
  
  The US never did get involved, even though over 100 US citizens were killed in that country, because this particular country had a large number of very lucrative diamond mines from which DeBeers obtained uncut diamonds at under 15% of their market value.
Simulations have their limitations. by no+longer+myself · 2004-02-26 00:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's the same thing with hurricane predictions. Oh sure, they've got a decent grip on about where it's headed, but those things can change direction and completely nullify any predictions made 24 hours earlier.
Reality doesn't scale down to the simulation level very well when you need an extreme degree of accuracy.
"Terrorists only have to be lucky once. We have to be lucky every time." -can't remember who said it.
1. Re:Simulations have their limitations. by Mukaikubo · 2004-02-26 02:23 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  That's why you have forecasters. A good one (I've got a little better success rate than most local weathermen, but The Weather Channel has the truly elite) only uses the 'models' as a tool to help him decide, based on experience and intuition, where the eye will land.
2. Re:Simulations have their limitations. by TwistedGreen · 2004-02-26 02:46 · Score: 1
  
  ...based on experience and intuition...
  
  By which you mean 'guess.'
Re:A better predictor by Shadwell · 2004-02-26 01:18 · Score: 0, Offtopic

You trolls aren't even trying any more.
now i understand by buttahead · 2004-02-26 01:49 · Score: 4, Funny

populate a model code-named Iago, after Shakespeare's arch villain

in my fonts, `I' looks like `l'. I thought lago would be a very slow implementation of logo. I like the shakespeare's villain idea much better.
"I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought..." by hambonewilkins · 2004-02-26 03:03 · Score: 2, Interesting

"...it'd do any good"
So, the U.S. uses complex simulations to predict terror attacks. Hypothetically, in response, terrorists use complex computers to predict US counter-attacks.
Eventually, the two sides solely use their computers, instead of actually attacking.
It gets a bit fuzzy when Matthew Broderick steps in and the computer learns the only positive outcome is not to fight at all.

--

God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
Terrorists for teh win! by darkmayo · 2004-02-26 03:14 · Score: 1

So if we use Counterstrike as the model will we learn to fight terrorism by wallhacking and whoring the AWP?

--
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
September 12 by jafuser · 2004-02-26 03:17 · Score: 1

Has anyone else seen September 12?

--
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Re:Psycho-history? by bersl2 · 2004-02-26 03:39 · Score: 2, Informative

psycho- is how it's spelled. psi upsilon chi (omicron|omega) is the root, from Ancient Greek

and it's Foundation

and birth, not born

otherwise, good English.

now, as to "psychohistory": it seems that someone beat you to the punch. The problem with predicting human behavior is that humans and human society are very complex systems. Read up on your complexity theory and chaos theory.
Superb Idea! by curtisk · 2004-02-26 03:50 · Score: 1

All we need to do is write another app that hooks into the simQaida world and extracts their waypoints and LOS data
BAM!
We know exactly, undoubtably, where they are moving currently and will move in the future and how far they can see in the real world!

--
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Hari Seldon, anyone? by brandonY · 2004-02-26 04:24 · Score: 1

I'm sorry, but when I heard a bunch of little groups of people was far too grainular to model in really large groups, I just started thinking about psychohistory.
Anybody ever read Richter 10? by Ayaress · 2004-02-26 04:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

In the book, this guy built a model of earth and used it to predict earthquakes. It worked fine for a while, but it started failing more and more often. The book never gets around to exactly what happens with the model because it gets destroyed in an earthquake...

Which is about all we need. A terrorist who happens to have a sense of poetic justice and blows up the very machine intended to predict his next target.
America's Army by WormholeFiend · 2004-02-26 04:46 · Score: 1

I've never played that game due to lack of interest, and from reading a bit about it, I wasnt able to determine who plays the opposing force... players or bots?

If players are the opposing force, then it should be fairly simple to organize an "anti-America" group of players with game options that favor terrorist behavior...

I'm not entirely sure if this idea would be well received, considering the aim of AA, but it might have interesting results, if non-bots control terrorist fighters.
1. Re:America's Army by Ayaress · 2004-02-26 05:13 · Score: 1
  
  When I've played AA, half the time the opposing force is your own "allies" who don't seem to give a flying fuck about the whole concept of cooperative gameplay, and want to treat it like any FFA deathmatch game.
Then the good players get visits from the FBI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 05:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'd be a little worried playing this game. What if you were really good and you happened to simulate some attack a little before it happened in much the same way you did it in the game. Next thing you know you'd be a suspected terrorist.
1. Re:Then the good players get visits from the FBI by Corpsesarecute · 2004-02-26 15:51 · Score: 1
  
  It's a good point, and because of this, no one will feel safe... which will actually negate the whole goal of the program because no one will act as dastardly as possible, therefore not giving the government the data they so desperately need.
Re:Psycho-history? by BRSloth · 2004-02-26 05:21 · Score: 1

Shit, I really though there was something wrong there, but after 36 hours coding with MFC without sleep, things really get messy inside your brain.

But you really should read the book. The way psychohistory plays inside the history is very interesting. What would you do knowing all the big events in the humanity?
What are you talking about? by beakerMeep · 2004-02-26 06:25 · Score: 1

I am sure Bin laden will get stuck in walls and will keep jerking back and forth while trying to find me with his 1337 pathfinding abilities. Not only that I hear he's a Lagger. OMG LOL U$A=0nwt!

--
meep
WTF? by SkunkPussy · 2004-02-27 00:16 · Score: 1

WTF has modelling al qaeda got to do with the iraqi resistance? the myth that iraq was harbouring al qaeda has been widely debunked, as have pretty much all of the other excuses that GWB/TB used to go into Iraq.

Iraqi resistance are fighting against what they perceive as a (neo colonial) invasion of their country, whereas al qaeeda commit terrorist acts against american and perhaps other western targets.

--
SURELY NOT!!!!!