Symposium will teach AIs how to wage nuclear war

This is great. Now we have to worry about computers nuking us into the dark ages. I heard of the Defcon game but never played it. This is just a little spooky. What are the implications?

A group of talented programmers will pitch their DEFCON bot against enemy bots in a series of one-on-one thermonuclear chess games. The winner is the programmer whose bot successfully annihilates its opponents and racks up the highest death count. IEEE is offering a $500 prize to the deadliest DEFCON AI bot competition winner.

fidgit.com...

Now would you like to play a game?


[edit on 21-6-2009 by jackflap]

This has many implications given the military's desire for completely autonomous weapon systems.

Sure enough, plans are well under way to develop robots that can locate and destroy targets without human intervention. There are already a number of autonomous ground vehicles, such as the seven-ton "Crusher" developed by DARPA, the US military's research agency. BAE Systems, a British defence contractor, recently reported that it had "completed a flying trial which, for the first time, demonstrated the co-ordinated control of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles autonomously completing a series of tasks". The Israelis are already fielding autonomous radar-killer drones known as Harpy and Harop, and the South Koreans use lethal autonomous systems to defend their border with the North.

www.telegraph.co.uk...

US to build fastest computer on planet for managing nuclear arsenal

A supercomputer with the processing power of two million laptops is to be built by IBM for the US government to help manage its nuclear arsenal. IBM announced it was developing the technology for its "Sequoia" system, which will be easily the fastest computer on the planet, with delivery to the Department of Energy (DOE) scheduled in 2011. According to IBM, Sequoia will be able to achieve performance speeds of up to 20 petaflops or 20,000 trillion calculations a second. IBM estimates that the computing power of the Sequoia system will be greater than that of every one of the current systems on the Top 500 supercomputer rankings combined.

technology.timesonline.co.uk...

I know there was a thread that was started about this. I wanted to put this here because the topic and the article is something to think about.

The alert signal reached Sequoia in the early hours of the morning. The sun had not even come up over the horizon and the cool breeze of the night still swirled around the steel hatches that housed the solution. Immediately countering the threat, Sequoia applied all the launch codes needed to release a staggering parry against the incoming threat.

The peaceful silence that Jim had been enjoying abruptly ended. He had been leaning against one of the fence posts he had erected the day before looking at the stars and thinking of what had to get done that day. He heard a loud thump as the hatch doors swung open and released the stale air had that had been trapped inside the silo. A long siren waled at the same instant that sent chills down his spine.

He stood wide eyed as the darkness was turned to daylight with each missile that was expelled from deep under his farm. He was not the only one surprised. All across the eastern United States, missle after missle shot from the ground in a devastating counter attack.

Meanwhile, in the middle east, Rajh and his freinds were busy learning how to play Defcon for the first time. They had loaded the program and each eagerly waited for their turn. Rajh sent a few tactical payloads to the eastern United States and hoped his calculations were correct. He wanted to win.

Deep within the servers of their country, Sequoia had detected the attack. Its response was cold and measured.

What do you mean off topic? It could happen.

DARPA seeking Genesis-style godware capability

As for the vatful of smart-chemicals, they're expected - without human intervention - to be able to form themselves into drugs, organic fuel cells, solar powered biofuel supercrops or "a similarly complex system". It won't have escaped alert Reg readers that the Physical Intelligence DARPA wonder-ware will be quite capable of becoming intelligent life - potentially much more capable life than humanity itself. The AI algorithms which evolve from the spontaneously self-organising Tetris blocks might far outclass the human noggin: the fuel-celled, solar-powered, self-medicating lifeforms which emerged from the smartware vats would be immeasurably our superiors physically.

www.theregister.co.uk...

Evolving Robots Learn To Lie To Each Other

Posted 08.18.2009

With the development of killer drones, it seems like everyone is worrying about killer robots. Now, as if that wasn't bad enough, we need to start worrying about lying, cheating robots as well. In an experiment run at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland*, robots that were designed to cooperate in searching out a beneficial resource and avoiding a poisonous one learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the resource. Picture a robo-Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 different groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code "genome" that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it.

www.popsci.com...

Had to remember this one for later. Also the link below, to a thread about scientists creating evil artificial intelligence.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 24-8-2009 by jackflap]