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P2P Goes To War 110

Posted by Hemos from the kablam-smash-gnutella-napster dept.
lostdogfound writes "OpenP2P.com has an interview with Michael Macedonia, the chief scientist and technical director of the U.S. Army's training facility known as STRICOM, who says peer-to-peer technology could help the military build less expensive and more effective training simulations. It sounds like a holodeck sort of environment, and he hints that some major theme parks are interested in the technology."
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P2P Goes To War More

P2P Goes To War

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  • Desensitization (Score:1, Interesting)

    by steveo777 ( 183629 )
    I suppose the best way to desensize people is to put them inside of a Quake III environment and having them blow crap apart. I know I don't cringe when I see someone on Saving Private Ryan get blown in half anymore. I don't even feel bad, although I probably should.

    I've read that many of the guns found on Civil War battlefields had been loaded numourus time without being fired. People just diddn't know how to be trained killers then.

    I may get flamed for it, but I know this kind of stuff is part of the reason kids are brining guns into schools and shooting people up.

    • Somehow I don't think that seeing the most cartoony death gib ever ::Quake:: could desensitize me to violence and death. The russian videos on stileproject, yes, Quake no. But I guess if you expose anyone to enough violence they will eventually be desensitized
    • I am currently going out with a girl that just went through Basic Training. She says they actually used Saving Private Ryan in many of the classes she took. They used it to emphasize certain points of battle, but you can be sure the issue of desensitization part of the choice too.

      I'll have to ask about Quake. I didn't hear anything about that, though it is fairly common knowledge the Quake engine has been used to train military personell in certain situations.

      ... and kids are bringing guns to school because they are being mentally tortured, not because of Movies. Even this girl I go out with, who has at least been made to "not cringe" at violence, doesn't carry a side arm or threaten to kill in every day life. Something has to be there to cause violence, whether it be torture or your country telling you "that's the bad guy" (and the bad guy firing back).
    • Thats because saving private ryan is a movie and you know it. I bet you would have a much different reaction if (god forbid) your friends\classmates are really being cut in half rather than actors being digitally cut in half. I've played every "doom-like" game ever made starting at a young age and real violence always makes me very uncomfortable. Like one of the previous posters said about his girlfriend, even people trained to kill, who *are* desensitized to violence arn't necessarily going to butcher the neighbor kids. Theres a saying .. don't know where its from.. "A lion in battle, a lamb in the parlor."
    • Sorry, but you just pulled a logical fallacy. [infidels.org]
      The fact that you feel that you have become emotionally detached from a movie doesn't mean that this is part of the reason that kids are bringing guns to school.
    • Um. Where to begin .

      The Marines (the US variety) have been using a modded version of DOOM for a while now. Last I looked they were going to mod Quake.

      How many times have you seen Private Ryan? Your not getting desensitezed to gore per se, just that damn movie.

      Cival War battles and musket loads. It's a noted fact for many wars, not just the American Civil War. It's not that they were (or weren't) trained killers - loading / firing a musket is a multiple step process and it's easy when getting shot at to get rattled and skip a step or repeat a process.
    • I dont think this is what's causing kids to kill each other... but soldiers definately are getting more vicious. I can see the results of playing hours of counterstrike.....sometimes I walk into a room and I get a though like...."if I was trying to hold this room..I would do it from over there" and that really scares me....giant peer-to-peer military simulations kinda scare me in genreral

      • I got the same thing with looking for optimum grappling hook travel paths when Quake 2 was big...

        Look on the bright side...if you ever have to defend your home against criminals/terrorists/thought police/girl scouts/whatever, the little bonus of some strategic thinking just might save your life. Thinking like a soldier doesn't have to be a bad thing, as long as you don't act on it without reason.

    • <SARCASM>
      What? I thought that Marilyn Manson,
      skateboarding, and computer knowledge were the
      things that drove kids to commit murder in
      schools.
      </SARCASM>

      Please pardon my sarcasm, but I'm really getting sick of this whole argument.
  • It sounds like a holodeck sort of environment...

    Replicating people running around in puppet suits?

  • The Army Groks Simulation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DG ( 989 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @03:29PM (#2231902) Homepage Journal
    I've had opportunity to train in the Close Combat Tactical Trainer at Ft Knox, and it's one of the best things I ever encountered in my military career.

    When you train live, in the real world, there's really no good way to tell who killed who. I've seen exercises with millions of dollars of equipment and dozens of highly trained, professional soldiers degenerate into a game of "I shot you first!"

    In the simulators, you get to actually employ the weapons against targets, and work with the results. Make a mistake, and you get killed. Get killed a few times, and you start learning.

    And besides, it's a kick-ass game. :) Beats Q3 down cold.

    Even as rough and clunky as the system was around the edges, it was still the best training I ever had. My biggest regret was that we didn't have one at the home unit - if we did, I'd've had the boys spend hours in it every day, practicing, and getting better and better at the job.

    Simulation is the next big military advantage, and the Army has really grabbed ahold of the idea. Watch for some cool stuff to come out of this space.

    • Although I noticed this bit:
      The Army's now going to something called Army Knowledge Online, and they're centralizing the funding for computers, networking and MIS management. They're not necessarily centralizing the operation, I think that'll be the next step. They're trying to come up with an AOL-like model for the Army, for computing.
      I don't know, but this seems like trouble to me.

      :)

      - - -
      Radio Free Nation [radiofreenation.com]
      an alternate news site based on Slash Code

    • I've had opportunity to train in the Close Combat Tactical Trainer at Ft Knox, and it's one of the best things I ever encountered in my military career.

      Which is why my nick is just too cool ;-)
    • Ha HA!


      I actually worked on that puppy! Rough and clunky it may be, but remember, it's a DoD procurement :> - we did the best we could with what we had at the time. Hundreds of thousands of lines of Ada - yes, Ada... and it's still one of the best things I've ever worked on.


      We used to play in 'em - "test" sessions where we'd do all kinds of strange stuff to try to crash the simulators or the CGF (computer-generated forces, everything that moved that didn't have a person behind it). We joked that if the budget fell short, we could roll up the high-bay doors and charge folks $15 for 10 minutes. You'd need to come as a crew - it takes 4 to run an Abrams (ok, 2 can do it in the sim, but the person in the turret running the gun and sights is gonna get bruised on the equipment).


      Wow. CCTT on Slashdot. My career is validated ;-)

      • I was one of the original SIMNET developers at BBN in the 80s. One of the problems we had at that time was scalibility -- we used broadcast ethernet to relay vehicle state to all other vehicles. As you might imagine, this doesn't work very well once you get up to 500 or so vehicles.

        HLA uses a single or multi-server architecture, which allows entities to "sign up" for objects and event they find interesting. Each entity can also be a server, which might be the way to make the P2P part work.
        • I'm an HLA plankholder - have the certificate around here somewhere. Was on a team that modified the CCTT CGF to play in HLA way back when, around '96-'97 or so.

          We had a couple of SIMNET units to compare against - "played" in them some evenings, too, to figure out how some of the interactions worked. We bumped up against the limits of the DIS protocol pretty fast - biggest cost was that the update processing from all those other entities eventually stole all the processing time your local CPU had to do its simulation in. Multicast helped, but managing the groups was a pain. HLA's publish-subscribe model worked better, but the RTIs (Run-time Interface, for those playing along at home - the "servers" in HLA) didn't perform too well - didn't scale for us. But that was then - I'm sure they're MUCH better now.
    • > I've had opportunity to train in the Close Combat Tactical Trainer at Ft Knox, and it's one of the best things I ever encountered in my military career.

      To the extent that you feel comfortable discussing it (uh, and to the extent you feel comfortable downloading a 64M demo ;) how did the guys at Operation Flashpoint [flashpoint1985.com] do?

      The reason I ask is that for the past few years, I've been itching for an FPS game that does a reasonable simulation of the foot soldier's experience. I think these guys are close, but I have nothing to compare it against. (And as a civilian, I'm grateful to you .mil folks, past and present, for that lack of experience!)

      All I know is that when I tried the demo, I had a wonderfully-intense feeling of "Oh crap, stick near the rest of the guys around my CO who look like they know where they're going, and try not to get shot in the process!", which seems to my untrained mind like a major step in the right direction over the Quake and Half-Life mod scene...

    • If it's that much fun, perhaps countries could use simulators instead of having real battles. Seems like a lot of wars are about culture, religion, or just egos. In other words, they're not about anything physical.


      So set the leaders and top military commanders up with one of these 'games'. If it's fun enough, they'll get so engrossed that they'll forget what they were fighting about.

      • Which wars are those? I'm curious for your viewpoint...all the wars I America has been involved in were a) in response to direct threats to national soverignty (and, yes, in the 50's and 60's the expansion of communism was percieved as such a threat) or b) treaty obligations.
  • Is this tech being mis-labeled as "peer to peer" when it is actually more about load balancing and resourse sharing?

    I see how asset sharing might be a peer to peer issue, but virtual environments that need a lot of processing power seem to be more in the rhelm of distributed processing rather than any "P2P" setup. Could someone explain?

    • Re:question: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ROBOKATZ ( 211768 )
      Yes. The article was ridiculous buzzword hype.


      To use a popular example, take a game of StarCraft. There is no central game server, or "simulation authority" -- the game is distributed over all the player's machines, with tokens passed in a ring containing player commands for that timeframe. So, yes, it's "P2P" but BIG FUCKING DEAL. This is nothing new, people.


  • When I first saw the headline, I mistakenly thought that people had started attacking Gnutella sites. *Phew*
  • If they do set up such a network, they should open up some restricted simulations to the public. I'd pay $5 for 5 minutes in a full scale war simulator fighting against my co-workers...

  • After they download Operation Flashpoint [flashpoint1985.com] (that game, er tactical simulation, absolutely KICKS ASS by the way) off of gnutella I'm sure it helped out their simulations quite a bit and helped "reduce costs".


    BTW: Don't pirate. If you like the game: buy it.

  • I thought Morpheus [cnet.com] could only deliver music and pr0n. If I can get grenades and tanks now, I should really download the latest version!
  • All gnutella users are herby ordered to stop or risk violating national security.
  • So while the P2P technology gets the support of the Military, while the RIAA, etc goes after it because of their paranoia.

    Maybe national security will trump corporate interests after all.

    or will folks get discounts on their weapon purchases?

    [smile]

    - - -
    Radio Free Nation [radiofreenation.com]
    an alternate news site based on Slash Code


  • I have been amused by the p2p nonesense for a while now... But this story just makes no sense. In what way could p2p possibly help anyone build a simulator?

    Anything that can be done with p2p can be done just as well without p2p, if you remove legal/ip boundries.

    Pat Niemeyer

  • History of Military Simulators (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hillct ( 230132 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @03:42PM (#2231973) Homepage Journal
    The military has had a rich history of network based simulations. Since the dawn of real networking (with decent bandwidth) there have been military simulators, the first of which were of Naval battle. The navy sunk billions into such projects in the early 1980s, connecting unitssimulating various American, Brittish and French vessels (including submarines), as well as computer generated russian vessels which had all the unique characteristics of each. Durring that period of the Cold War, the navy has some of the most advanced network based simulations available. The technology discussed in the article isn't really that new. Granted, now we have a lot more bandwidth and processing power. You have to admire the systems built in those days specifically because of the accomplishments made dispite these limitations.

    --CTH

  • Sun Tzu said it best... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mellifluous ( 249700 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @03:55PM (#2232037)
    The ultimate deployment is formless.

    If you cannot analyze your opponent's organization, then you cannot fight it. This is especially apropos in the digital battlefield, where a P2P network minimizes the dependence on any one node.
  • We now have the army claiming P2P saves lives. Will the RIAA care? Will the MPAA care? Will the courts care? No. They didn't care about all the previous arguments in favour of P2P and they will be quick to dismiss this one. It doesn't matter how much good it does, if even 1 britney spears song gets through it threatens the economic balance of america.
  • "We call it "simulation on demand," so that when you need to learn something, when you need to experience something, when you need to plan something, you can instantly get it."

    how long before our boys figure out they can simulate a 6', blonde lady. Definate bombshell learning.
    • how long before our boys figure out they can simulate a 6', blonde lady. Definate bombshell learning.

      Ensign Barclay! That is NOT appropriate use of the holodeck!

  • OT: P2P resources (Score:3, Informative)

    by PureFiction ( 10256 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @04:23PM (#2232171)
    The emerging P2P scene is still pretty interesting. For the curious there are a few good resources out there for the latest info on peer networks in general:

    www.infoanarchy.org [infoanarchy.org]

    www.peertal.com [peertal.com]

    Decentralization mailing list [yahoo.com]

    P2P-hackers mailing list [zgp.org]

  • I believe that Slashdot had an article on a related subject. There is a link [rit.edu] or two [unisa.edu.au] about this on the 'net.

    According to some of the work done in the field, some of their largest problems have to do with the location of the person, the direction that the person is facing, and the angle that their head is at to properly display WHERE the graphics are going to be put.

    Read the links posted above as they describe more effectively that I ever could what is going on.

  • SAT Range? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Usquebaugh ( 230216 )
    This sounds very much like the 'Small Arms Training' range.

    I've been in the process of setting one of these up in my living room :-) Well ok maybe a simplified version. It's no where near complete yet http://home.pacbell.net/ajmoir/LightGun.htm

    It also helps that the old American Laser Games, MadDog McCree etc are soon to be released on DVD :-) http://www.digitalleisure.com/pr010517.html

    If you like the idea of playing these sort of games then drop me a line.
    • This would work - but a good hi-res projector is going to be expensive (it possible to build a cheap video projector though, I guess). If you are real serious about this though, price won't be an issue.

      You mentioned on your site that you didn't like an all optical system, but you didn't give much in the way of detail why. You mentioned refresh rates and such, so I imagine you are talking about the scanline based systems for determining where you shot at.

      Here is another possibility - optical as well, though:

      The gun is optical, has a lens to focus the light from the monitor/crt onto a phototransistor. When the trigger is pulled, all the targets can flicker at different frequencies, alternating between the normal image and an all-white image. The phototransistor would pick up which one you are aiming at based on brightness and frequency.

      At least, it is a theory. Probably wouldn't work great, though. Using a laser pointer is good, but the projector portion is going to be the bad part (expen$ive)...
  • "...it sounds like a holodeck sort of environment..."

    What the article describes is a head mounted display connected to a powerful 3D engine. In the long run, the same thing could be done with a nice virtual reality helmet and a Quake Mod.
  • [vr-atlantis.com]
    http://www.vr-atlantis.com/default.htm

    This place already has units in Korea, and a couple other amusement parks. I spoke with the Pres at one time about a job. Very nice set up they have and they plan to ip them world wide.

    Strap into a VR-Quake machine for 5 bucks and play someone half way around the world in life size VR.

  • Not just desensitization (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @04:42PM (#2232258) Homepage Journal
    The Marine Corps at one point used a customized version of DOOM for training... wish I could remember the URL!

    Now to more serious stuff...

    STRICOM is the Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command [army.mil]. They are heavily into distributed simulation (especially DIS and HLA).

    I recall that at one point they ran some exercise (I think it was REFORGER, but I could be wrong) completely simulated, involving units from all over the world. This was back in the '95-'96 time frame.

    Also, simulation isn't just for desensitization. It's mainly used for vehicle simulations. Remember, those planes/tanks/whatevers ain't cheap! Not to mention the ability to train soldiers under battle conditions without risk to their lives.
  • to stop all those damn rookie accidents. One cool thing out of it, is that by the time the military adapts it, it will be standard practice for us. It's a cool idea. Will it work though?
    My favorite quote though is the following:
    Now one of the major theme park companies is very interested. I will not reveal their name though, but did you notice that we're in Orlando?
    I can just see it's a small world after all in a holodeck enviornment. LET ME AT THAT SNIPER RIFLE!

  • One of the big things that's coming out today, or the last two years, has been EverQuest, which is a 3-D virtual reality game. There's other ones called Asheron's Call and Altima Online.

    Altima Online!

    Drive your Nissan Altima around in a virtual world populated with thousands of boring commuter automobiles! Avoid parking tickets! Quest for cheap gasoline! Rack up mileage! Altima Online, coming soon to a PC near you.

  • With the exception of a couple people reminiscing about working on military simulators back in the day, I have found every single comment to be exceptionally retarded.

    Please go learn something, then come back and have an intelligent discussion.

    Thank you.

  • Microsoft will spend 2 billion dollars on the XBox... The entire Army budget for research and development this year is $1.6 billion. So Microsoft is spending more money on a game console than the Army is spending on basic and applied research. So we're in a dilemma here. We can't outspend Microsoft.

    Doesn't anyone else think this is scary?
  • The truth feathered and tarred
    Memories erased and promise gone
    Trading your history for a VCR
    Cinema, simulated life and trauma
    Birthright, culture, Americana
    Chained to the dream they got your searchin' for
    The thin line between entertainment and war

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