theres a pretty interesting article today from the bbc about the u.s. army’s intent to build a virtual “second earth”…to be fully detailed and at full scale. shit. the u.s. army is currently working with the game company there to build an accurate model of the earth at full scale so theyre able to not only simulate battles, but also to “let the Army simulate intelligence work as well as patrols, planning and working with indigenous populations…”
coincidentally, theres also another article today on popular science about scientists attempting to create computer models of social thought patterns so theyre able to predict the behavior of whole populations. the way they describe the agents and coded behaviors reminded me of the “massive” program utilized for crowd control in the lord of the rings movies. individual agents were prescribed with a set of behaviors and reactions, skills and thought patterns, which helped it to determine its course of action as it independently made its way thru its environment. in the defense departments case, the pentagon has laid down some $100 million to develop the oneSAF program, a similar agent-based modelling program they hope will be able to anticipate terrorist activity. they essentially plan on replicating the enemies of the u.s. in virtual form in order to predict their behavior. quite scary.
now combine the agent-modelling with the full scale virtual earth and you have the potential to make some truly scary shit. hypothetically, they could build the full-scale earth down to every little detail, encode real-world physics, populate it with independent-thinking agent-models with prescribed behaviors, then interact with them in order to determine their behaviors and reactions in a real-life scale and environment. all virtually. this is the basis for how many movies? they could potentially even set the agent parameters, let the program run on its own, and see where society is in a hundred or so years…whether theyre bombed out or hopping from planet to planet…
> creating a second earth (via bbc)
> predicting behavior (via pop sci)
it’s interesting that ‘there’ could be reborn as something scientificly useful. i was really interested in ‘there’ when i first heard about it and tried the beta.
as it stood at that time it was a pretty stale online experience. you can walk around, talk to people, and buy clothes. hmm… that kinda sounds like something else i’ve experienced… oh yeah… that thing called REAL LIFE. the only non-real thing they had were hoverboards like strait out of back to the future2 and some dune buggies.
if you’re gonna make an online experience you have to make it interesting. people are naturally boring. hoverboards and dune buggies don’t cut it compared to other things you can do online.