DARPA Uses Preteen Gamers To Beta Test Tomorrow's Military Software 84
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a story about an interesting (or, you might think, creepy) institution at the University of Washington's Seattle campus. It's the Center for Game Science, a research lab that makes educational video games for children, and that received the bulk of its funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the wing of the U.S. Department of Defense that supports research into experimental military technology. Why is DARPA the original primary funder of the CGS? According to written and recorded statements from current and former DARPA program managers, as well as other government documents, the DARPA-funded educational video games developed at the CGS have a purpose beyond the pretense of teaching elementary school children STEM skills.
Ender's Game (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew it was real.
Watch the skies for the Bugs.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, in "Ender's Game" the plan resulted in a wonderful victory for our side... It is a sad story because of the genocide of the enemy, but not because children's abilities were creatively used by the military.
Re: (Score:2)
Compared to saving the human race that "cost" is a pebble in the Universe. For even if humanity prevailed through other means, it would have taken longer — meaning (much) higher losses and expenses. Many more children would've suffered the loss of their parents and older siblings, for example.
Re: (Score:2)
Winning a war — especially that for your very survival — does justify risking the soldiers' well-being — and even lives.
Re: (Score:1)
There will always be another war, another enemy; it seems that mankind keeps track of its history this way, from who we were at war with last, to whom we are currently at war with, and whom we will be at war with tomorrow.
Re: (Score:2)
Aliens are remarkably hard to find, actually. Even in that Science Fiction book there was only one race encountered.
Possibly. But that's irrelevant — unless you are arguing, humanity should punish its war-mongering self with suicide so that "better" species can develop and take over.
Re: (Score:2)
Are arguing from the book or the movie?
Ender's Game (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like the military picked up a copy of Ender's Game and assumed it was some kind of manual for how they should do things. Let's just hope they never find a copy of Neuromancer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I'm reading Diamond Age right now and should've thought of that first.
Re: (Score:2)
Oddly, I was thinking of the Robin Williams opus _Toys_.
Re:Ender's Game (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The world of Path from _Children of the Mind_ would also be a pretty bad follow-up.
Not that strange (Score:3)
boots don't have hands or fine motor skills.
Re: (Score:2)
I think "boot" meant "enlisted personnel" [wikipedia.org]
The Last Starfighter (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You deserve extra points for not saying Ender's Game.
The only thing that made me think of Ender's Game was the word "preteen". Using video games to train/recruit soldiers always makes me think of The Last Starfighter.
Re: The Last Starfighter (Score:2)
Nevermind, I was thinking Babylon 5.
Re: (Score:3)
There's trouble right here in the galaxy, Trouble with a capital T that doesn't rhyme with K that stands for Ko-Dan.
Ender's Game (Score:2)
The only way this could've been closer is if the game they were developing was Starcraft, but they missed that window by about 16 years.
You know why they use preteens? (Score:1, Informative)
Because the pentagon/darpa are completely ran by pedophiles [huffingtonpost.com]
I want to play global thermonuclear war (Score:3)
global thermonuclear war
Re: (Score:3)
1992, Toys (Score:3)
Are we just trying to make reference to Robin Williams all week?
This is just yet another sign that the military saw the movie 'Toys' ... as if the whole drone program wasn't an obvious enough sign:
http://kotaku.com/5891256/wtpt... [kotaku.com]
seems to be the trend (Score:2)
NSF has been shifting its funding away from CS research, and DARPA has been moving a bigger proportion of its funding from basic research to near-term applied research. As a result, there are more and more strings attached to research-grant money. Some kind of "dual-use" thing where you're doing the research you want to do, which DARPA also happens to be able to repurpose for its own uses, is if anything the best case. It's not that uncommon to just straight be working on whatever DARPA wants done.
makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, in that case, what is the meaning of the new game, where you shoot members of the Tea Party [breitbart.com]? Celebration of tolerance? Respect for other people's opinions?
Please, don't hate.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This was actually my first thought as well. You need a system that 8 year olds can navigate proficiently, because you're going to have a lot of folks in the army who don't have an education much past that, who will need to rely on these systems for their life, potentially while under fire. It has to be able to model complex scenarios and yet deliver it in a way that promotes clarity and simplicity.
I mean, what's the alternative? Make it complex and expect dullards will rise to the challenge, completely
Re: (Score:2)
the more i think about it, the more i think the article should probably be re-titled 'DARPA Uses Tomorrow's Military
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know what the requirements are for enlistment now, but I do know that back when I was in the Navy ('Nam era) it was pretty much a given that everybody in the Navy had at least graduated from High School. Of course, back then, the Navy had the highest mental standards (and the Marines the lowest, although they did have the highest physical standard) and I don't know what the Army required. Now that t
What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't some sort of military indoctrination, or child-warrior program.
They're evaluating adaptive learning software, doing UI/UX evaluations, and so on. Yes, DARPA's goals focus on future military application, but despite the comments above, they're not making this some sort of Ender's game scenario with 8 year old kids flying drones. These kids are playing games that are trying to teach them STEM skills, and doing so with a sort of machine-learning backing. So the kids are learning, they get to use cutting-edge software backed by a hefty financial contribution, and the end result could be a new way to provide computer-aided teaching.
So there's no need to cry, "Think of the children!" - they're doing fine.
It's also good to note that these concepts are not restricted to military applications. Take a quick look over DARPA's history - much less the history of military science in general - and you'll see a bunch of amazing creations that we use in our day to day lives. Like the internet, GPS or the continued funding and support for self-driving cars and autonomous robotics.
One caveat: I'm not saying that military funding, DARPA or otherwise, shouldn't be transparent and examined, but in this case, there's no problem other than people who can't demux 'military' with 'automatically bad'.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah isn't it great? The amazing things we build today to go bomb innocent women and children in the third world are used tomorrow to indoctrinate our own citizens to stand behind government and cheer them on in doing it.
Re: (Score:2)
to
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or it could be they're testing the next-generation of UIs so when those children grow up to be of serving age, they can easily sit down and use them in war.
They're children now, and will take at least a decade before something real comes out. That's about long enough to take the DARPA research stuff and implement in military hardware so by the time the children hit 18, it's ready.
DARPA is research, and it can take many years to commercialize the research. Being military related, well, a decade is probably t
Re: (Score:2)
they're not making this some sort of Ender's game scenario with 8 year old kids flying drones
No, but they can use what they learn about 8-year-old kids to best adapt methods for 18-year-old kids.
Just ask any insurance actuary when humans mature mentally - for men it's about 25 (women earlier but one cannot have "sexist" policies in the US, damn the data).
Raise the age of majority and enlistment to 25 and they'd have to reinstitute a draft to fight wars like Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Kids sign up eagerly - mat
Re: (Score:2)
quietwalker, you are treading dangerous waters. If you talk sense here, people won't be sure if you're on their side or not, and then they won't know whether to mod you up or down. Look at the other replies to your comment...they've got you practically eating babies already. Stop making sense and expecting people to think. I find it's best to make jokes.
Re: (Score:2)
So the kids are learning, they get to use cutting-edge software backed by a hefty financial contribution, and the end result could be a new way to provide computer-aided teaching.
I was thinking first having kids learn about finances so they learn at early age the basics instead of becoming like many adults burden with debt from misuse of credit cards and borrowing plans. But that's another topic.
Getting back to this topic, I haven't seen the movie or read the book but I looked up Enders' Game to see what reference was. It seems creepy the parallels. Perhaps my Gripe of the Month is so much value is placed on warfare but I guess that's were progress is made. i.e. computers, interne
Re: (Score:1)
The replies to you are hilarious. Too many Slashdot trolls think military = kill people.
While the military's primary role is the application of force in the nation's interests, they also do quite a lot in other areas. Medical/dental training, engineering, disaster relief, organizational management, trade skills such as welding, pipe fitting, electrical work, machine operations, are all things the military relies on heavily, all of which require training. They are exploring methods to find ways to encoura
Re: (Score:1)
The military relies almost exclusively on private companies for technology development not DARPA. The military also brought some teenagers in to evaluate and offer suggestions for the F-22.cockpit control layouts. The teenagers were given very little knowledge of the systems involved and part of the testing and evaluations was to see how long it would take to intuitively understand the functionality by themselves. On average the testers pretty much figured every thing out in about 30 minutes and started mak
Hint... (Score:2)
Greetings, Starfighter. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Listen, Centauri. I'm not any of those guys, I'm a kid from a trailer park.
This is just like that movie (Score:2)
Toy story (Score:1)
DARPA wanted kids to design drones (Score:2)
A while back DARPA had the Adaptive Vehicle Make(AVM) project which was to combat the exponentially growing cost of military hardware development by implementing an opensource hardware hackerspace/fablab style model(with more buzzwords than I desire to recall).
Part of this project was MENTOR(another huge acronym), which was going to set up schools with their own makerspaces and have students "compete against one another in the development of cyber-electro-mechanical systems of moderate complexity such as g
reminds me of the movie "toys"... (Score:1)
throw kids in front of some machines and see if they can run the war...
What an oddly written article (Score:1)
The first part of the linked article basically seems to imply that the military is developing games that covertly brainwash kids into soldiers. DARPA has no reason to fund anything like that. We're Americans, our culture does that for free!
Two thirds of the way through, it dispenses with that unstated pretext and makes itself about the military and Federal government's overreach into American educational institutions, which is an excellent point that I can get behind. I wish the author had dispensed with th
Sieg Hall? (Score:1)
Wow... that's so close to something else [wiktionary.org] at first I thought the name was a joke... given the context where "Sieg Heil" was popularly used...
Re: (Score:2)
As for the need to pull young people in your getting close to Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Paramilitary group as with Hitler Youth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The "military training contexts" as mentioned seems to stand out long term, as with the desperate drive for more basic quality science and math and beyond.
The UK seem to have consider the same need for science and to build the ranks of its gov and private sectors with:
GCHQ
US Army - Enders Game Meets 3d Printing (Score:1)