US Military Builds MMO Earth Simulator 525
transient writes "BBC reports that the US military is creating a second Earth with help from There. At the moment, only Kuwait City has been modeled, but the ultimate goal is to model the entire Earth using existing terrain data and a super-accurate physics model. While combat will be part of the game, 'the emphasis in the artificial Earth will be on human interaction rather than conflicts involving lots of military hardware.'"
Dup? (Score:2, Informative)
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0
Which talked about stuff from here
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04
Re:Psychological impact (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.battlefront.com/products/tacops4/tac
"TacOps 4 is the commercial version of "TacOpsCav 4", an officially issued standard training device of the US Army. It is a simulation of contemporary and near-future tactical, ground, combat between United States (Army and Marine), Canadian, New Zealand/Australian and German forces versus various opposing forces (OPFOR), simulating the Former Soviet Union, China, North Korea etc. Various civilian units and paramilitary forces are also included."
Gaming doesn't blur the distinction anymore than the training to take orders and it's "Us vs. Them" does for a soldier.
Since 1942 the US Army has trained at Ft. Irwin in wargames. Commanders already see the theatre of operations as a game, thats how they deal with the massive amounts of people, equipment and casualties they will deal with. At the lower level, situtations have been gamed for hundreds of years and numerical values have been established to units, ships and fortifications have been in use since at least the 1750s.
Re:The map is the reality (Score:3, Informative)
I discussed this with folk a little while ago, here [slashdot.org]
Re:Psychological impact (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree. If you join up, you know the risks involved. There are many reasons for someone to join the armed forces, but fundamentally everyone knows the deal. You do as you're told. You might get killed. You might have to kill others. That's no real problem for a human - the veneer of civilisation is a very thin one, and we can easily regress into the 'kill or be killed', 'fight or flight' primitive responses. No problems there.
If however, you start to present these lethal environments as a game, you're making a flank attack on the soldier's psyche. You're saying "this isn't real", when it patently is. You're lowering the barriers for doing things that even soldiers do not do. ("Shall we waste the villagers ?", "Sure why not, let's see what happens"). People do things in games that they would never countenance in real life, even in real-life battle, even if it's simply to see what the programmers have in store for you if you do...
Your last paragraph is talking about game-theory. I have no problem with viewing a conflict using game-theory - this is a mathematical model to count losses and victories, a way to count the cost; I'm all-for ways to count the cost.
Using game-theory is very different from treating war as a game, one is a deplorable attitude, the other is responsible accounting. Troops die in war, and you may sacrifice company A so that B,C,D all get through. Fine, this is war. Sorry they died, but it was necessary. Unless you have a cost model, you can't even say it was necessary...
Simon.
Re:Choose your weapon... (Score:2, Informative)
Or would you prefer we fight w/ no clue as to what we're doing. Is a bloodbath preferable?
this is such old news. (Score:1, Informative)
Technological Inertia. (Score:3, Informative)
Just becuase we can do something, does not mean that we should. We ought to categorically oppose all technology used for the sake of automated control (red light cameras, airport profile scanning, etc). Unfortuantely, because we can do it, we do it anyway... obsessive-compuslively sticking our fingers in the electric socket despite conditioned responses warning us otherwise. As the Beatles said in Yellow Submarine "I can't help it I'm a born lever puller."
Slowly this automated control enters and enters and we adjust and become accustomed... and whether or not Bush is in office doesn't matter, for we have already become a prisoner in our own minds and houses.
Not first. (Score:3, Informative)
The beeb is reporting it because they read the article on Homelan Fed [homelanfed.com] last week. There's more coverage here [mt2-kmi.com]
IE's influence There (Score:2, Informative)
Re:There = Evil (Score:3, Informative)
It's like McAfee doesn't want to do business with you if you aren't running a well-tested virus vector.
OpenSourceTerrain modelling (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Choose your weapon... (Score:5, Informative)
The correct quote is "violence never solves anything".
Violence may wipe people off the face of the earth but it does not solve problems. Sure rome destroyed carthage but their politics never let them have
long-term peace and the cost of their military might eventually bankrupted them.
While the Republic of Venice did fight some wars their politics allowed them to find solutions that were much less costly than wars. Venice as a small state still lasted over a thousand years from the height of byzantium to the coming of Napoleon.
Re:Choose your weapon... (Score:0, Informative)
They want the US troops out of Saudi Arabia and the other muslim countries, and to stop supporting oppressive governments in the Muslim world. You can't overthrow a dicatator if the US is giving said dictator weapons and diplomatic legitimacy.
They aren't doing it to oppress women. I think most people really don't understand the issues, and your statement is an ignorant one like most others. Terrorists dont "hate us because of our freedoms," they hate us because we're acting in our own interests at the expense of theirs. So what if Musharraf is a dictator to his people, he's helping us. Pakistanis are really ticked off now.
Re:Choose your weapon... (Score:3, Informative)