Chaotic Dynamics: A Novel Approach to Intelligence Analysis in Asymmetric Warfare

[Brian Hanley]

Brian,
In your attempt to be the Renaissance man of the board, you are exposing your ignorance on certain subjects.
I even provided links to the multiple thrusts to this project.

Looked at them. Careful about assumptions regarding responses. I developed the virtual work immersion system design which is still, today, ahead of its time. (BTW - UVC was a distribution outfit, not an engineering firm - I mentioned that for completeness if anyone tried to look it up.) I solved a basic problem of synchronization unique to battlefield sims (bullets move fast) that is doubtless still in use. (Or it should be. Things sometimes get lost.) I'm the kind of guy that is sometimes sitting there while some board chairman or stuffed suit blathers bull#### to people who don't know any better. Always remember that a demo is just that, a demo.

... we are within 12-18 months to having this capability. The pieces are already developed, we have tested them using HLA, now we are doing direct plugins using open APIs.

What is "this capability"? There's a long ways between "pieces developed", APIs and a VTK and putting high level stuff together.

I've been in the acquisition side since Novemeber 2002 ; I'm still getting paychecks, I must be doing something right.

I'll note that I have been on the development side for considerably longer than that, and that the military has been supporting this stuff for 19 years. (With similar predictions from folks in your position along much of the way.)

Let's go through, point by point, your statement that generated my response.

The MEU is sitting off the coast of Africa, Burkina Faso has just launched the balloon and a NEO Op is ordered. On the big boat the intell bubbas pull down NGA data sets for Ouagadougou and import then into the virtual world.

Completely doable. Those can be put together and canned ahead of time.

Mean while back at the embassy the Gunney or Embassy Stan type bubba sends the detailed buildings that they have created of thier hooch via secure line to the big boat. The intell bubbas put this into the virtual world.

Doable. But I think it's unlikely those building plans would come from the embassy unless they had them on file. It would make far more sense to have them on file stateside. For more likely you'd have satellite photographs and stateside (or shipside) teams putting together any custom VR world than to offload it to somebody at an embassy. Even definition files can be tricky.

Now they pull up the AI library and insert Sahel French language and culture plugin. The final effort is edit the artificial intelligence to match current intel.

You could make some very dumb bots and place them in the world. You might even be able to do some degree of speech recognition. You could have a library of canned "characters" but they would not be capable of intelligent interaction. Look, I am quite aware of the state of "AI", it's various branches, production systems, (Minsky-esque) neural nets, KNN, Fuzzy systems, etcetera. Whether "AI" even exists is highly debatable. What we have now can, if stretched, imitate a cockroach's intelligence. We aren't up to mouse yet. Everything else is just a production system or an illusion of grammar, a la ELISA.

Which is not to say such things can't be useful as far as they go. But be careful about overselling them and particularly careful about throwing "AI" around. Cheers.