Slashdot Mirror
The War Of The Virtual Worlds
man_ls writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute is working with the U.S. Joint Forces Command to harness supercomputer power, to simulate a virtual continent for use in urban battlefield situations. The simulation, set in the year 2015, involves 100,000 entities to simulate, although the system can support more than a million."
Reminds me of this
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182587/
hook it up to America's Army. A 100,000 player MMOFPS/RTS, with a command structure, a continent to fight over and no modular missions. A big-picture, constantly changing war. Wanna make it even cooler? have new technology appear every few years, have the ammount of new weapons you can build related to how much of the land/natural resources you control - have things built on percentages, not just numerical limits.
Of course, the thing is that this just becomes a big computer game rather than a military training system, but like America's Army which is really designed to get people to sign up for the US Army, (as long as everything is realistic) this would actually allow the powers that be to know just who the best leaders/tacticians/strategists are in a time of crisis, without having to actually get a few 1000 soldiers brains blown out to seperate the wheat from the chaff.
Oh, and have the 'leaders' in a virtual command HQ, which could potentially be overrun / blown up.
Wait... that was the entire plan for my world-dominating computer game... d'oh. No-one do anything with it for a while, will you? I'm just popping out to the patent office.
FGD 135
why the US govt does not use sometihng like the american army game to test tactics and run simulations and train on..
some of the tactics I hear about in IRAQ I know I have used in counterstrike years ago.
the FPS gamer is one of the greatest resources of tactical study.. add in a prize for a team that can push out the blue team from the fortress and you just trained your soldiers in the blue team in real combat technique.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here's another quote for you:
"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun."
-- The Dalai Lama
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I've actually worked with that simulator before -- bad collision detection is probably the least of it's worries.
Seriously though, this is good for gamers, because this technology will inevitably end up in our games. Planetside tried to make a FPS with that many players, and while their cone of fire killed it (among other things), I definitely see FPSs going in that direction in the future, especially with the increasing availability of broadband.
I've always wanted to have large historic battles, but since the numbers of soldiers were so large back then, it wasn't really feasible for a FPS, but now perhaps they could do it after all. Can you say Battle of Helms Deep with every character being a real person?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
This simulation sounds like a bad idea. As with any mathamatecal model, it is only as good as the assumptions made, regardless of the resolution. This is exactly the kind of thinking that screwed us up in vietnam. Our foregn policy was being decided by mathmaticians when it should have been decided by historians. I get the impression this is planning for the next Faluja. Our problems in Iraq are not due to bad tactics, they are caused by bad strategy. I dont care how well your soldiers are trained; in urban combat the best kill ratio you can hope for is 10 to 1. We don't need more teraflops we need some good old fashoned common sense. http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_author/gary_brecher .html/
Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs
I wish it were possible to not study war. Of course I would prefer it if everyone went about his business (his because it's usually the male population) without feeling the need to dominate other people or extract money from them or capture them as human slaves. As one of the militia leaders said in Black Hawk Down, "there will always be killing. This is how things are in _our_ world." The main benefit of having a highly trained fighting force is that you can strongly motivate people not to misbehave, especially if you are the world's "911" service, set on a hair trigger to attack and destroy anyone who launches a first strike of WMDs against another country. I know it's a rosy view but it beats the alternative I think. Yeah, I know that something should have been done about Rwanda. Don't forget that there is an African Union and there are neighboring African states that are supposed to send troops into areas like Rwanda, as was done with Liberia last year. Hopefully Darfur will motivate them more than Rwanda did.
In any case, "We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us." (unknown, attrib. to George Orwell). I for one hope that our forces remain the best in the world and that the new administration has a more globally conscious intervention policy.