Your Tax Dollars At Work, Part Eighty-Nine

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Scott Jennings| 33 Comments

US military to test emergent AI systems in commercial MMOs.

To test out the computer generated humans’ “humanity,” Parmentola and his researchers want to unleash some of their cyber Soldiers into so-called “massively multi-player online games” such as “World of Warcraft” or “Eve Online” – games frequented by thousands of super-competitive human players in teams of virtual characters fighting battles that can last for days.

“We want to use the massively multi-player online game as an experimental laboratory to see if they’re good enough to convince humans that they’re actually human,” he said.

Or failing that, they could totally grind for Aldor rep.

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  • dartwick

    Blizzards going to sue their ass.

    On a more serious not(yes Im serious) this is uncomfortable place where Bnet meets Skynet.

  • http://www.alan.org Ant ButterNut

    So basically, the US military is stating that they intend to violate the WoW EULA?

  • http://weblog.probablynot.com jason

    So… the government’s new plan to fix the economy is gold farming bots?

  • Pandanapper

    I’d like to see what they can come up with and if it’s good enough, will it be entered into next years Turing contest.

    But what interests me most is, now knowing this, will Blizzard be able to come up with new techniques to flush out government bots? And if so, will the government put a halt to it?

    And another thing to bake your noodle, do you think the Chinese government will try the same?

  • http://ixobelle.com ixobelle

    try as i might, i can’t think of a worse way to prepare noodles than by ‘baking them’.

  • Mortarion

    In the movies: The military releases Skynet into the defense systems of the United States, and it takes over.

    In real life: The military releases Skynet into Azeroth, and it farms up 10,000 gold an hour then heads to Stormwind to spam gold-selling ads.

  • http://www.alan.org Ant ButterNut

    2012 AD: The US Goverment completely pays off the national debt using US Army Gold-farming Bots.

  • Viz

    Dude, if we could actually make over $1 trillion a year with gold-farming bots, I’d be all for breaking a few EULAs.

  • Dekyriel

    I also really fail to see how the USA’s national debt (which grew larger than its screen amount of digits allowed just recently) will be reduced by making this large, government supported, Turing test.

    Boggles the mind.

  • Iconic

    Yea, the cost of bandwidth, programmers, and CPU cycles is just so staggering that it’s pretty much a choice between testing out neural net AI or Social Security.

    That’s why North Korea is so poor. They spent all of their national resources on Glidebot.

    /sarcasm

    My biggest concern is that this AI thinks that real human beings act like MMO players, and here after can only emulate douchebag behavior.

  • Iconic

    P.S,

    If
    “1,000,000,000,000,000″

    (that’s, 1000 trillions) is more than your monitor can display, maybe it’s time to make the jump from EGA.

  • Freakazoid

    Yeah, I don’t think the government understands that games like WoW are not a reflection of real people, insofar as they’re the few douchebags or isolated losers you would meet in any country, just concentrated into one game.

    There really isn’t a good way to judge regular people through the internet. However, an AI stuffed into a robot mingling with people at the usual social junctions would provide some interesting results.

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    After the grind to 70 and the grind for gear most solders terms will be up…

  • Ashendarei

    quote: “If
    “1,000,000,000,000,000″

    (that’s, 1000 trillions) is more than your monitor can display, maybe it’s time to make the jump from EGA.”

    ___

    he was referring to this:
    http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/07/debt-clock/

    Also, I’m not sure that emotionally traumatizing these newly developed AI robots is the best way to “field test” them.

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    Just wait until the government learns the best way to get to the top is to cheat and break as many rules as you can… Furor Planedefiler could teach them how to mem hack and climb to the top and then translate that to a developer gig under the name of Jeffery Crysalot.

  • Mercury

    Fools. Don’t know they that doing things Blizzard does not like can have them declared copyright infringers?

  • TPRJones

    I think WoW and eVe are reasonable choices. It could have been much worse.

    Would you rather they used Second Life as the AI’s introduction to humanity?

  • Davide

    A sizable percentage of real players wouldn’t pass a Turing test…

    All the army has to do is make an AI that tells Chuck Norris jokes and start arguments with anyone else that says anything.

    How on earth would you ever tell the difference from a real player?

  • Bleaktea

    If they can learn to stay out of the fire, then I welcome our new machine raiders.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com wowpanda

    I bet this thing will be useless, but the millions $$ spent on this did give us some good laughs…

    All thanks to Scott Jennings who turned that piece of useless crap into something with some value :-)

  • http://www.worldofwarcraft.com Ashtaar

    I, for one, welcome our new machine raid overlords. Let the epics rain down upon us.

  • yunk

    Future news headline:

    A raid on a cave in Afghanistan missed Osama Bin Laden by mere hours. Sources say a government robot trolling forums looking for secret terrorist websites found them, but at the last minute tipped off the terrorists by calling them “nubs” and telling them how Chuck Norris could kick their collective asses.

  • Sheepherder

    Oh god…

    So many good fury warriors and ret paladins, lost…

  • Sheepherder

    I was responding to #19. So I need to figure out this XHTML crap. May I suggest a preview mode?

  • Dekyriel

    To Iconic: Well I certainly wish you’ll never have to sort out priorities for a country’s economy…

    This is clearly not well employed money, sorry.

  • Viz

    It’s not-well-employed money that is to the government’s budget what that penny you dropped while paying at the convenience store is to your salary. You want to attack government spending habits? There are much better targets.

  • Dekyriel

    There are no better targets than every targets. This could be said for most country of course, but it all depends on the debt you have at hand. Being a French citizen, there are many things I could think of.

    One of our biggest “debts” (so to speak, because it can be recovered in a relatively easier fashion than a national debt) atm is Social Security. That is well employed money to me though.

  • Dekyriel

    Forgive the typos, I just woke up and am about to go to work heh. That said, I don’t mean to give anyone lessons. As I said, most countries spend part of their money in dubious ways. Sorry if I came across as arrogant.

  • Davide

    “All your base are belong to us”.

  • Iconic

    Dekyriel:

    If you believe that all government spending is wasted money, then it’s wasted money.

    Since I believe that SOME government spending is very well spent, and I believe that the cost of this type of research is a pittance, I don’t consider it to be wasted money.

    Now if it turns out that this is just an excuse for army officers to Pwn faces in WoW, then it’s wasted money.

  • Dekyriel

    Well I couldn’t answer this question but since the money is spent by government, they naturally have to justify its use unless it’s sincerely blatantly obvious. Here, it’s clearly not, to me anyways :p

  • Viz

    Apparently, since you don’t feel the need to set priorities in criticism of government budgeting, your supply of criticism is much less limited than government funds?

  • Saben

    This sounds more like they are careful about not wasting money. First of, they are still evaluating if it would be useful, so as to not waste money. Second, AI is a valid field of research since it is useful in unmaned vehicles. Evaluating if they can use an existing system like WOW to do tests, sounds like they are trying to think out of the box to save money on not having to fully develop a system of their own to do it. I’d be worried if it was the only system they use to test it out but there is no indication that is the case.