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DARPA Files Patent On Predictive Simulation
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has a post on a patent filed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), seeking to control a new potent predictive simulation. The patent outlines the process, which may someday allow researchers to accurately predict the behavior of observed subjects. They're not there yet, but not for lack of trying. It already works in some military war game scenarios, says the patent. 'Parunak says his model can successfully detect players' emotions, and then predict future actions accordingly. He believes the technique could one day be applied to predict the behavior of adversaries in military combat situations, competitive business tactics, and even multiplayer computer games. The patent application gives an interesting insight into DARPA's goals. The agency has pumped a lot of money into AI in recent years without reaping major rewards. One day computers may find a way to accurately second-guess humans, but I suspect we may have to wait a little longer yet.'"
If you're close enough to see your enemy, you should be shooting them, not waiting for a computer model to generate
Someday I'm gonna be walking around an apartment in Paris to find a computer program that greets me with a full summary of my file...
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Interesting point. In someway you have "reproduced" invention.
For a patent to be granted, someone skilled in the art should be able to take the patent and build it.
"The patent statute requires that the application describe the invention in its "best mode" to enable an individual skilled in the art relevant to the invention to be able to repeat the invention."
If they can't actually build it, this SHOULD be a mute point.
Folks likening this to Harry Seldon's psychohistory in Isaac Asimov's books are missing the point. Psychohistory was predicting the movements of a society as a whole. What DARPA is striving to do is predict the behaviour of individuals faster than those individuals can act.
An "obvious" method for doing this is to somehow capture the individual's state vector and that of its surrounding environment, and simulate it in faster than realtime. Stuff of science fiction for now, and it is usually referred to as possessing one's theory of mind (Charles Stross likes to use the phrase a lot). For combat environments, I can't fathom how this'd work. At best, it looks like it'd be feasible for strategy planning, but not in a tactical situation in physical operations.
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Depending on the legal interpretation. On one hand as a government agency all work done by DARPA should be public domain. On the other hand they somehow managed to patent this. Does this mean that this is an anti-patent, i.e. no one else can patent this anymore and everyone can use it? Or did they find a legal loophole which could prevent everyone else from using the tech? If it's the latter, it's pretty horrible. DARPA pays for a heck of a lot of fundamental innovation each year (with taxpayer money, of course). If they start patenting it a lot of things will come to a grinding halt.
Any lawyers on the thread?
Just another magic box solution, for when political appointees are placed in positions of authority when they have absolutely no idea what they are doing, they can now point to the magic box in the corner and blame it and the prior administration for all the problems that they themselves have caused. It always used to annoy me when staff would try to get me to produce magic box solutions out of the computers, I always used to politely remind if they could get the computers to do their job for them then why would they continue to pay their salary.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen