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."
Does it have a 'no George Bush' option to see how the world would be doing without him?
Seriously, I wonder how much the current fiasco in Iraq has to do with the desire for this program. There are probably a lot of people who would like to have been able to say: "Mr. President, our supercomputers say that this is a bad idea."
It could be used for politics. Imagine someone from Ron Paul's campaign saying: "Our ideas are better, and now we can finally prove it!"
PS: Hey, Zonk! It is spelled 'parallel'.
Where "parallel" is spelled "paralell".
The downside is that the full version of this simulator will be powered by the electro-chemical activity of six billion human beings.
Whoa.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
They should have called it W.O.P.R.
New rule: if you can't spell, you can't smoke pot.
Hand it over, Zonk.
I sure hope it comes complete with options to unleash a tidal wave, hurricane, rioters, and UFOs, just to you know, see what happens.
I do hope they get the fjords right... lovely crinkly edges...
Running from a fight isn't always the right thing to do. And if you think Iraq is a fiasco, look at how many people died from not standing up to Hitler early enough. Hint: it's not measured in thousands, but TENS of MILLIONS.
Face facts: right now, in Iraq the US is fighting a war against the agents of Iran.
And the rhetoric coming out of Iran is straight out of Mein Kampf. Except this time around the ubermensch are Islamic, and the subhumans who deserve to die are infidels, "crusaders", and - once again - the Jews. Imagine that.
Only this time, the megalomaniac will have nukes, and since he's not just a power-hungry despot but a religious fanatic, he won't be afraid to use them. How many UN resolutions do you think it will take to stop Iran's nuclear program?
So yeah, let's run a simulation where Iran's rulers get their way in the Middle East. How many nukes do you think it'll take them to "wipe Israel off the map"? Hey, that's what they OPENLY SAY they're going to do.
They've been doing that for a long time with or without computers. For example, during the first gulf war, Iraq's water treatment facilities were deliberately targeted. Later the DIA assessed the effect that sanctions restricting replacement parts and vital chemicals would have on the population.
Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline. With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations Sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.
So they accurately predicted that Iraqis would die because of the sanctions, and indeed they did, in droves. Denis Halliday who was running the humanitarian operation resigned, calling the sanctions "genocidal". His successor, Hans von Sponeck also resigned and condemned the sanctions and the effect they were having on the people.
Maybe they will share with me the simulation sequence of events that finally get me laid. There could be something useful in all this!
... I think this will lead to the opposite.
"Mr. President, we found a scenario in which Iraq will become th 52nd US State, oil will flow freely, WMDs were found in Saddam's closet, and bin-Laden was found in his bedroom."
"Excellent! Invade!"
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Find the hottest female you can & grab her ass.
If she slaps you, you'll know you're alive real quick.
If she fucks your brains out, you'll know you're alive a little slower, but for a longer period of time.
If you're a simulation, then you've just got away with grabbing some hotties ass.
You can't lose.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Shi'as believe that Muhammad al-Mahdi will reappear when the world has fallen into chaos and civil war emerges between the human race for no reason. (Twelfth Imam) Ahmadinejad is part of an unorthodox group that believes muslims can hasten his coming by deliberately sinking the world into chaos (as opposed to "no reason"). (A nuanced discussion is here.) The publicly announced intention of Iran is to sink the world into chaos so as to usher in a new age.
Mutually Assured Destruction does not deter such a leader, because mutual destruction is in fact his goal. The job of our government *should* be to confine the destruction to Iran as much as possible. It seems tempting to try and replace Ahmadinejad, but we always seem to screw up and make things worse with such attempts. (See Iraq.)
This also hits upon a weakness in the scenario presented in the original Matrix (the sequels are dead to me). If the machines control the world, how can the rebels even exist? Forget about the logic that Agents should have reaperbot aims, they should be able to materialize 15 ton weights and anvils to drop on runners. So, why aren't they?
The retcon I came up with makes a lot of sense. The machines are like the Japanese of the 80's, not being very good at inventing technology but very, very good at improving it. From this perspective, they never invented the matrix technology, it was probably a military application that got spun off by some start-ups to create live-in MMORPG's. Whatever the reason, the technology existed. The loading construct, the world simulation, all of this is built on top of existing code. I've not done a lot of programming but I've seen scary projects where people have no idea what parts of the code do, they just know it breaks if you touch it. It's left alone like the forest where the bogeyman lives.
So, how did the war go? Machines fight man, man blackens the sky, mass human die-off, machines struggle to come up with a way to survive. Machines would of course have fusion power so humans are not batteries. Human brains turn out to make great parallel processors, cheaper than trying to do it in silicon. Why do they humans have whole bodies instead of just brains in jars? Because that's what the original technology was designed for and the machines were not able to figure out a way around it. So how are humans able to hack into the system? Because there are holes that even the machines can't figure out how to patch. If Windows is the most complex software project ever, just imagine what code will be like that far in the future. Why are the Agents not able to hit the humans every time they shoot? Jammer software prevents the agents from getting a good fix on where a fast-moving runner is, there's enough imprecision in what they know of as the xyz coordinates that they can miss unless they're close. Why can't the agents make anvils fall out of the sky? Because of anti-cheating code leftover from the original design. The deja vu-causing hacks are time-intensive enough to pull off and can still bug the system, thus they are of limited use. Why is the timeline set in the late 20th century? Why not the 19th century? Why not the 17th or ancient Rome? Maybe that's what the best codebase they had was designed to simulate. The movie never answered whether the entire world was simulated from pole to pole or whether it was just the city they were in. The movie never stated how the timeline was manipulated, just how far the machines ran through the world before resetting the timeline. Did they run through a five year interval and just do a memory reset for everyone in the Matrix? Did they run multiple world instances? None of these questions were answered and they probably would have bogged down the movie if they were.
Anyway, I'm still laughing at the idea of Harsh Realm, the guy's supposed to spend a season or two hunting down a guy who should be sitting in the VR pod next to him. Reset the damn sim!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Comment removed based on user account deletion
no one would pay the energy bill for a simulation of male humans who mostly sit at their computer either posting on slashdot or downloading pr0n and wanking off. QED, you're all real.
The behaviours of actual individuals are subsumed into the larger crowds, although 'warlord' style individuals may be represented from a political perspective. The emphasis is on trends, not predictions of actual individual actions. A good analogy for this is Psychohistory in Asimov's early Foundation novels - and the current sims fall a long way short of the predictive power available to Hari Seldon.