Slashdot Mirror
Military Running a Parallel Earth Simulator
Fantastic Lad writes "The US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality. Putting supercomputers to an innovative use, the military is simulating our planet in an effort to predict the outcome of different scenarios. They might run tests to see how long 'you' can go without food or water, or how 'you' will respond to televised propaganda. Billions of nodes are created in the system, intended to reflect every man, woman, and child. 'Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project. Simulex is the company developing these systems, and they list pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among their private sector clients. The U.S. military is their biggest customer, apparently now running the most complex version of the system. JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence."
I'd argue that that using prediction markets like the ill-fated Policy Analysis Market work much better for predicting future events. It's really too bad that there was an kneejerk media firestorm in response to the Policy Analysis Market, which killed it off before it could even get started.
Actually, I think it was an Outer Limits episode (the old series). Could be "Wolf 359", but it's been ages since I've seen the series, and I'm only going by the plot synopsis on Wikipedia.
Frank
Fuck The Black Swan, pick up Asimov's Foundation Series!