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Swarm in the News -> "The Sims Take on Al Qaeda"
From: |
Darren Schreiber |
Subject: |
Swarm in the News -> "The Sims Take on Al Qaeda" |
Date: |
Sat, 3 Nov 2001 13:03:29 -0800 |
Here is the text of the story as it appeared in yesterday's Los
Angeles Times, including a quote from our own Marcus Daniels:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-000087179nov02.story
WAR SIMULATION
The Sims Take on Al Qaeda
[*] Borrowing from the popular computer game, the new breed of war
games might simulate the unpredictable methods of terrorists.
By KAREN KAPLAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
MONTEREY, Calif. -- Inside a concrete-and-glass laboratory at the
Naval Postgraduate School, a computer simulation of Osama bin Laden's
Al Qaeda terrorist network is beginning to take shape.
Scientists are preparing to conjure deserts, urban landscapes,
communications networks, weapon systems, immigration patterns and an
army of terrorists cunning enough to design plots of mass
destruction. They also are fashioning millions of potential victims
who will be preyed on thousands and thousands of times.
In the new war against terrorism, with its infinite possibilities for
unpredictable violence, the military is attempting to understand
jihad through the infinitely patient and dogged computer.
"Interesting things happen," said Michael Zyda, who is leading the
Navy's simulation project here, "things you didn't expect."
Military strategists have long used computers to wage virtual war,
modeling the clash of armies and the devastation of nuclear weapons.
But terrorists aren't fighting on traditional battlefields. They
aren't organized into traditional fighting units. And, as the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon demonstrated, they don't
care whether they survive.
The new breed of virtual war game is attempting to push into that
unexplored terrain, drawing from a burgeoning field of artificial
intelligence known as "agent technology."
The goal is to create a framework flexible enough to probe the
possibilities for attacks in any setting. Researchers at Argonne
National Laboratory already are using this approach to scan the
country's energy distribution system for vulnerabilities that could
be exploited by saboteurs.
Though many particulars about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda remain a
mystery, the programs need understand only the broad outlines of how
they work. The details of their strategies are supplied by the
simulations, which run through millions of possible terrorist
configurations to find the ones that are most threatening and
destructive.
The terrorist simulations are similar to the popular computer game
"The Sims," in which players create their own digital worlds and
populate them with autonomous characters that roam about and grow,
often with surprising results.
Zyda and his fellow researchers suspect the same simple yet
unpredictable interactions that make "The Sims" so lifelike have the
potential to illuminate the unpredictable methods of terrorists.
In essence, they are creating their own "Sim Osama."
"Some of the very best games have very, very simple rules," said Will
Wright, creator of "The Sims." "But amazingly elaborate strategies
emerge that you can't predict."
The hub of the military's effort is an obscure research center known
as the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute in
Monterey. It is one of several groups, including the Defense Modeling
and Simulation Office in Virginia and the Army's Simulation, Training
and Instrumentation Command in Orlando, Fla., dedicated to producing
military simulations.
Zyda, a 47-year-old engineer with the demeanor of a gung-ho
dot-commer, presides over more than 30 researchers who study the
various ingredients of simulated reality. Their specialties include
human movement, terrain re-creation, surround sound and casualty
estimation.
On a computer screen in one of the institute's spartan offices, 200
red and blue dots march across a tan grid, representing some foreign
terrain. Zyda watches as the blue dots devise their own attack
strategy to gain control of a coveted red army stronghold.
The scenario will take less than a minute to resolve. It unfolds
differently each time, although the blue dots, which have a slight
advantage in numbers and skill, are usually victorious.
The simulation program, known as GI Agent Editor, is the seed for Sim
Osama, a long-term research project that might not be completed
before Bin Laden is captured but will provide valuable information
for the inevitable conflicts of the future.
It has taken decades of computer research to reach this point. When
Zyda began work at the Naval Postgraduate School 17 years ago, war
games were like elaborate choose-your-own-adventure stories. Each
program could be played out only within a well-defined range of
possibilities.
One training simulation that Zyda worked on had Army infantrymen move
into an enemy building while under fire from a digital sniper. Though
the sniper could adjust his strategy based on how the infantrymen
advanced on his building, all he could do was shoot from a window.
The weakness of these war games has long been understood. Though they
served as useful training exercises, the simulations were unable to
accommodate anything new or unusual. They certainly couldn't serve up
a scenario that planners hadn't anticipated.
Even before the advent of computers, military strategists understood
that these limitations could have dire consequences. One of the
best-known warnings came from U.S. Navy Adm. Chester Nimitz after
World War II.
"The war with Japan had been enacted in the game rooms at the War
College by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing
that happened during the war was a surprise--absolutely nothing
except the Kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war," Nimitz said.
"We had not visualized these."
Before Sept. 11, no one had visualized the potential of multiple
suicide attacks using hijacked jetliners.
Zyda awoke at 6:30 that morning to get his daughter ready for school
and turned on the radio. The first plane had crashed into the World
Trade Center's north tower, and when he heard the news he instantly
suspected terrorism.
"I started thinking right then, 'How do we model this?' " he said.
Many of the critical pieces were already in place in GI Agent Editor,
which was developed by Army Capt. Joel Pawloski, a former scout
platoon leader and air cavalry troop commander.
Pawloski wanted the program to solve tactical problems, such as the
most effective way to deploy nine snipers among a 94-person attack
force. He created a blue army and a red army; and with a few mouse
clicks, he set the weapons range, movement range, durability and
marksmanship for each soldier.
Click on any of the dots and up pops a screen that displays what's
going on in the soldier's digital mind. One set of boxes shows the
numerical values for its personality traits, such as independence and
aggressiveness. Another keeps track of where the soldier is on the
battle grid and where it's trying to go. A third box lists the
goals--engage enemy, stay healthy--and shows which is of highest
priority.
Second by second, the dots spread themselves across the screen until
the blue soldiers have surrounded their target and the red soldiers
have retreated to the nearby foothills or perished.
Pawloski ran the simulation 165 times, with the blue army's snipers
deployed in a variety of schemes. It turns out that the blue army had
a 96% success rate when the snipers were deployed among nine-member
squads, with far lower success rates when they operated out of larger
units.
To the 14-year veteran, the results rang true.
"The snipers bring increased range of vision and firepower," he said.
"When the snipers are at the squad level, the stuff they see gets
communicated up to the leadership earlier, and that helps."
Planning small-scale assaults on Al Qaeda positions is the most
obvious use for GI Agent Editor in the war on terrorism. The
simulation's virtual terrain can be adjusted to mirror actual places
where U.S. forces are planning attacks, though it will take some time
for the technology to migrate from the lab to the battlefield.
But by adjusting other variables, the war game can begin to
approximate broader geopolitical factors. Soldiers can be accompanied
by hoards of civilians, who respond to bombing raids by flooding
refugee camps. Terrorists can be distinguished from Taliban fighters
by downplaying the value they place on self-preservation and boosting
their ability to operate outside traditional war venues.
Making the jump from a single battlefield to the global stage isn't a
matter of simply stretching the physical terrain. The key is
re-creating the range of ephemeral social, economic and political
forces that are at the core of terrorist conflict.
The task, in essence, requires teaching a computer to understand the
meaning of fear, hatred, bigotry and other emotions that fuel
terrorism.
"What happens if there's a little more racism in society?" said Ian
Lustick, a political science professor at the University of
Pennsylvania who has created a virtual Middle Eastern country to
experiment with such kinds of social upheaval. "What happens if we
open our borders to more immigrants? Or if we ban contacts between
one group and another?"
Answers to those questions reveal themselves to Lustick as brightly
colored blocks in a 50-by-50 square grid on a computer screen. Using
a pair of programs called Agent-Based Identity Repertoire and
Ps-i--short for political science identity--Lustick defines each
square as a person, a village or some other unit of humanity. The
color of a square indicates its allegiances.
The grid is a stand-in for a composite of Tunisia, Syria, Jordan,
Egypt and Iraq, and it is populated with about a dozen kinds of
people. Some are bureaucrats, who are loyal to the government. Some
are fundamentalists, who live in rural areas and aren't influenced by
the government. Some are fanatics, who can influence other agents but
cannot be influenced themselves.
As Lustick starts the program, the grid of colors begins to bubble in
seemingly random patterns. Gradually, the appearance melts into
larger clumps of color. Squares blink as each individual reevaluates
the shifting social forces surrounding it, then decides whether to
change itself.
Lustick has run these types of programs more than 10,000 times in the
last three years to examine the effect of social trends and
government policies on anti-American sentiment and terrorism in the
Middle East. He is looking for ways that seemingly small actions have
big consequences.
"I think about terrorism in terms of popcorn," he said. "You assume
you'll always have some kernels that are going to pop. How much lower
does the temperature have to get before you have a dramatic decrease
in the ability of terrorists to operate?"
His research has found that when the underlying relationships between
color blocks are constantly shifting, the blocks look to the
government as an anchor and their colors mesh into a pattern of
support. But if the blocks share a common concern about risks from
the outside world, they are more likely to become disaffected and
blend with dissident groups.
Lustick's flashing grid is conflict in its most abstract form. That
turns out to be its greatest strength--as well as its most glaring
weakness. Researchers are painfully aware that their models omit the
messy edges of real life, and some of them might turn out to be
critical.
"In practice, it's hard to get the information from the political
scientists into the hands of the computer scientists." said Marcus
Daniels, director of the Swarm Development Group, a spinoff of the
Santa Fe Institute that focuses on agent software.
In these simulated worlds, filtering out scenarios that are truly
implausible requires human judgment, which is fallible. They are
meant to augment, not replace, the intuition of seasoned military and
intelligence experts.
"We could have a detailed blow-by-blow story, and it could be
seductively misleading," said John Hiles, a research professor at the
Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute. "The danger
is that you'd use [simulations] as a substitute for your own thought."
In one of the early runs of GI Agent Editor, Pawloski was confronted
with a stunning rout of the blue army. Instead of fighting their way
to their usual victory, the blue soldiers scattered into the woods
and cowered.
Pawloski was puzzled at the development and immediately opened the
program's "brain lid" to peer into the thinking of the retreating
troops.
What he discovered was a logical flaw in the program. The blue
soldiers were programmed to follow their leader. But when that dot
was killed, the troops didn't know how to choose a new dot to follow.
Leaderless, they ran into the woods.
In real life, soldiers are trained to follow the next in line of command.
"That's the type of stuff you see, then realize you have to go fix
the program," Zyda said.
Pawloski fixed the bug. In short order, the troops were thrown back
into the fray to wage their virtual war.
--
___________________________________________
Darren Schreiber
Attorney at Law
Graduate Student
Political Science, UCLA
address@hidden
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~dschreib
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==================================
- Visual J++ Users, Bruce Godwin, 2001/11/03
- Swarm in the News -> "The Sims Take on Al Qaeda",
Darren Schreiber <=