December 29, 2003
Give peace a chance
I've written before about Massive, the computer program that created the sprawling thousand-orc armies for the Lord of the Rings movies. As you may recall, the program worked by creating each orc as an independent agent, driven by a few simple goals: Kill enemies, while trying to stay alive and avoiding overly-congested areas of the battlefield. When you combine thousands of these agents together, they create a highly realistic sense of the army being "alive" -- teeming with ripples of emergent behavior that could never be predicted or hand-coded.
But one behavior was particularly unexpected: Pacifism. Faced with a blood-soaked battlefield where hundreds of orcs were dying every second, the agents decided just to get the hell out -- and started running away. As special effects head Richard Taylor told The Montreal Gazette:
"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.
"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."
So some extra computer tinkering was required to ensure that the trilogy's climactic battle worked the way Jackson wanted.
Which is kind of poetic, when you think about it. The urge to avoid bloodshed and combat is so primal that even artificial intelligence constructs will stay away. And, as with real-life people, actually getting them to go to war means you have to subvert their natural instincts. In the computer, a few new lines of code will do it; in the real world, you need dark warnings about weapons of mass destruction. Call it "reality hacking."
(Thanks to Fark for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at December 29, 2003 09:17 AM
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Here's a longer and better article on the subject:
http://millimeter.com/ar/video_ai_armies/
You know, in 1700 (roughly) they discovered that aiming precision of the fusiliers was decreasing as they came closer to the enemy because of the stress of firng upon a real person they could look in the eyes. This is why they introduced shooting targets whith human shape in the training of troops. To get them used to fire without thinking about the human being they were killing.
They still do today.
I read this thing somwhere, if I find it I will post the title and author of the book.
Funny thing is that I am a softgunner and I shoot people no problem. Am I just training myself into some merciless war machine? HOPE NOT!
Peace,
Mario
Mario -- cool post! Yes, I'd heard about that discovery; it's discussed in David Grossman's excellent book *On Killing*, about the military's psychological difficulty in getting soldiers to kill, even in combat. Is that the book you were speaking of? It's really good.
I doubt you're training yourself to be a ruthless killing machine, by the way. Ever since Vietnam, most militaries have figured out training regimens that enable soldiers to kill without excessively dehumanizing them.
Well, that's the reason why nazis came out whith gas chambers: from the beginning they were shooting Jews and Gipsys and so on, after a while even the most fanatic were cracking. Nobody can bear so much death and horror, so they devised a way to kill masses of people in a less "personal" way.
I guess there must be something good buried very deep in human beings. At least there used to be...
About the book I didn't read the one you mentioned, but the thing about the fusiliers could have been in John Keegan's "A history of warfare".
Reading again my last comment I worried that some might wonder what was I referring to when I said "...There must be something good...". Well, I ment that for how much you brainwash people to make them stop considering other people "human", they will allways reach a point were this fact is jumping back on them.
In other words I find nothing good in the Olocaust, understood?
Don't worry, I understood what you mean!
I was watching The Two Towers DVD extras recently, and the WETA Digital segment described Massive. I can't remember if it was Richard Taylor doing the voiceover or not, but they talked about how early simulations had problems with orcs running away from the battle. They showed a clip of a couple dudes heading for the hills. But the reason they gave was not that the orcs were afraid to fight; rather, the agents were programmed to just start running if they couldn't see any enemies in their vicinity. The AWOL orcs had been randomly placed facing away from the battle, on the edge of the fray. Since they couldn't see anything to kill nearby, they started running in the direction they were facing, hoping to stumble across some unsuspecting manflesh.
So the orcs fleeing the battle weren't peaceniks. They were as bloodthirsty as all the rest -- just a wee bit stupider.
Oh, interesting! I'd read that it was both things -- some were heading off in search of stuff to kill, others were attempting to protect their "space", when faced with too many closely-packed adversaries. But either way, that doc sounds really cool.
Just a comment to the Germans using gas to kill jews. It was also cheaper and more effective in regards to dead pr day. In war, ammunition needs to be preserved.
I also remember reading somewhere (I can't for the life of me remember where) that during WW2 a certain number of rifles were never fired, simply because the soldiers could not get themselves to shoot another human being. But, like I said, I don't know where I read it so I can't give you any confirmation or numbers.
Good point about the cheapness of gas. As to your memory of that statistic -- actually, that, too, was disussed in David Grossman's On Killing, and I talked about it my profile of Grossman I wrote a couple of years ago, which is archived on my blog:
As Grossman points out, surveys of World War II veterans show that eighty percent of riflemen never once fired a gun during active combat, even when enemy bullets were flying around them. During the American Civil War, according to data collected after battles, many soldiers only pretended to fire their weapons, loading them again and again without actually discharging a shot. On some level, it seems, they simply couldn’t bear the prospect of shooting other human beings. Had they done so, casualties would have obviously been much higher.
Yes! I heard they found rifles on actual civil war battle fields which were packed with powder and ammo. But the explaination was that a misfunctioning occurred in the first shot without the soldier finding out due to the noise of the battle, so he kept on loading and going "click"...
