military » The Hawker Squawker

Psychohistory and the Sentient World Simulation

The Singularity Approaches 2 Responses »

Jul 232007

Has anyone read the Sci-Fi classic Foundation by Isaac Asimov? It’s generally considered his greatest work, and arguably one of the most important and influential science fiction stories of all time.

The premise of the series is that scientist Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory … Using the law of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale; it is error-prone for anything smaller than a planet or an empire.
–Wikipedia

By using psychohistory, Hari Seldon predicts the fall of the galactic empire and a 30,000 year dark age for all mankind. He realizes that there are already events in motion which he can not control, and thus the fall of the empire is inevitable and imminent. He can, however, via his ability to predict the future, set his own events in motion which will shorten the period of darkness to only one thousand years.

“Yes, that’s very interesting Scott, but so what – why bring it up?”

Good question, I’m so glad you asked. I was reading about a new project underway known as Sentient World Simulation. It’s a project funded by the Department of Defense that is attempting to simulate the entire world in real time and run thousands and millions of “what if” scenarios so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners.”

I’m not sure if this creeps me out or fascinates me. Probably a little of both. I would love to see how accurate their model is when they run a simulation, and then actually do what they simulated to see if their predictions were correct (as i’m sure will happen…; i mean, if you had a toy like that, wouldn’t you do the same thing? it’s inevitable)

Kurzweil Summary

Original Article

Anti-matter, positronium, and the military … oh my

The Singularity Approaches Comments Off

Jan 302007

The air force is rumored to be working on anti-matter energy (and of course weapons). Sounds a little Star Trekky, but very interesting nonetheless. The amount of power that could be produced from controlled anti-matter explosions would be amazing, but of course there’s always the flip side of the big nasty weapons that could be created.

Some quotes from the article:

1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal “23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.” Thus “positron energy conversion,” as he called it, would be a “revolutionary energy source”

Unlike regular nuclear bombs, positron bombs wouldn’t eject plumes of radioactive debris. When large numbers of positrons and antielectrons collide, the primary product is an invisible but extremely dangerous burst of gamma radiation. Thus, in principle, a positron bomb could be a step toward one of the military’s dreams from the early Cold War: a so-called “clean” superbomb that could kill large numbers of soldiers without ejecting radioactive contaminants over the countryside.

With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion

Smith is looking to store positrons in a quasi-stable form called positronium … “If successful, this approach will open the door to storing militarily significant quantities of positronium atoms.”

“If we spend another $10 billion (using ordinary chemical techniques), we’re going to get better high explosives, but the gains are incremental because we’re getting near the theoretical limits of chemical energy.”

And my favorite bit from the article:

Lynn is enthusiastic about antimatter because he believes it could propel futuristic space rockets.

“I think,” he said, “we need to get off this planet, because I’m afraid we’re going to destroy it.”

Original Article

The future of warfare

Technology Comments Off

Feb 162005

Ray Kirzweil was recently interviewed about his thoughts on the future of warfare. He had some interesting insights:

Wars of conquest or permanent
occupation seem increasingly unlikely. Granting that technology will
change, what will wars themselves be about?

… a key struggle will be against
fundamentalism, against groups animated by a desire to keep things the
way they are, or were. These struggles will tend not to be classical
struggles between nation states.

Does new technology, and in
particular the ‘singularity’ that you have identified in its rate of
change, make war more or less likely?

I
think classical wars will occur less often. Decentralized communication
such as the Internet is inherently a democratizing force, and has been
behind the move towards greater democracy in the world. Although not a
perfect system, democracies tend not to fight wars against each other.
Future conflicts will tend to be with smaller groups who will try to
amplify their impact by finding vulnerabilities in our technological
infrastructure.

Full article here

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons

Technology Comments Off

Oct 062004

The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars
investigating ways to use a radical power source — antimatter

The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons “is 10 billion
times … that of high explosive,” Edwards explained in his March speech.
Moreover, 1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal “23
space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.” Thus “positron energy conversion,” as he
called it, would be a “revolutionary energy source”

Full article…

“Build us a holodeck”

Technology Comments Off

Aug 202004

For decades, the entertainment industry and the military were advancing
the science of simulation on widely divergent tracks. The Pentagon
focused on developing high-end proprietary systems like the Close
Combat Tactical Trainer – a networked tank simulator that costs about
$1 million – while game developers loaded $49 first-person shooters
with enough pixelated firepower to convey the dynamics of skeletal
trauma and the physics of explosions in ever-closer-to-real time.

Those tracks converged at a 1996 workshop hosted by Michael Zyda, now
the head of the simulation lab at the Naval Postgraduate School. Former
Disney Imagineer Danny Hillis and Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull
brainstormed about “experiential” computing and electronic storytelling
with representatives from Darpa, Intel, and Industrial Light &
Magic, as well as the future head of ICT, a Paramount TV exec named
Richard Lindheim. The papers from that workshop persuaded the Army to
launch the Institute for Creative Technologies in 1999.

Now that consumer gaming engines like Unreal are able to render
cinematic-quality graphics in real time, even big-ticket munitions are
trivial to simulate. Launching a rocket in a live exercise can cost
$10,000 or more; the price tag for the Defense Department’s Millennium
Challenge – a three-week exercise in 2002 with 13,500 participants -
was $250 million. By contrast, the Army’s bill for underwriting ICT for
the last five years was $45 million. Rehearsing even a single mission
in the field also requires weeks of planning and construction. Using
synthetic environments like JFETS, the Army will eventually be able to
code new mission rehearsals incorporating up-to-the-minute intelligence
in a single day.

Full article…

DARPA, Mesh Computing, and Robot Cars

Technology 1 Response »

Mar 152004

Imagine a vast battlefield littered with thousands of tiny
acoustic sensors dropped from an airplane. The sensors can distinguish
the sound of, say, a falling coconut from the sound of a sniper’s
rifle. Each sensor can wirelessly communicate with neighboring sensors
via radio, compare notes, issue alerts, and send GPS coordinates to a
collection point if the sensors agree that there was a rifle shot.
This
battlefield awareness application, funded by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency and dubbed SensIt, is still two years away.
But it captures the promise of the next wireless frontier: mesh
networking. — PCMag article

Now
instead imagine a group of 15 robot vehicles that must navigate their
way across the Mohave desert without human intervention. This
past weekend, DARPA offered a $1million prize to any vehicle that could
do it. There were contestants from all over the country.
Unfortunately, they all failed miserably.

I woke up early
Saturday and switched to their live online coverage of the event.
Within a few minutes it was apparent that no one would make it.

Looks
like we won’t be seeing any robot driver’s licenses issued anytime
soon. All 15 self-navigating vehicles in a 150-mile race across the
Mojave Desert were knocked out within a few miles of the starting gate
Saturday, victims of technical glitches, barbed-wire fences and rugged
terrain. — Wired article

I
was talking with a colleague at work (who was also interested) about
the miserable failures of the vehicles. They all took the wrong
approach. They had vehicles of all shapes and sizes with radar
mounted on them to map the terrain as they went. Looks like they
should have done something different… How about mesh computing?
But unlike the quote above, don’t depend on an airplane to drop the
little sensors; have the vehicle spew them out all around. Each
of the sensors gathers information about it’s immediate vicinity and
then send it back to the vehicle. It’s quite easy from there for
the vehicle to create a 3d map of the terrain and avoid any
obstacles. After that it’s just a matter of building a decent
vehicle that can

spit out a few hundred sensors

take readings and generate a 3d map

drive from point a to point b

repeat until the finish line

I’m
sure it’s not as simple as that, but the idea seems sound. Maybe
I should find a team to join and give them some input?

Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha

The Hawker Squawker

Psychohistory and the Sentient World Simulation

Anti-matter, positronium, and the military … oh my

The future of warfare

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons

“Build us a holodeck”

DARPA, Mesh Computing, and Robot Cars

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