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US Army Using 'World of Warcraft' to Create Virtual Soldiers?
We've covered some crazy things from the U.S. Army, including telepathic thought-helmets and pledges to be one-fifth robot by 2020. Interesting stuff, for sure, but perhaps a little too far-out for most. While the Army will speak about a number of similarly wacky initiatives in its upcoming Science Conference, one idea will strike fear into the hearts of gamers everywhere: a plan to deploy virtual soldiers (to test advances in artificial intelligence) into the battlefields of 'World of Warcraft' and 'EVE Online.'
The games are two of the most popular massively multiplayer online games currently on the market, filled with people who spend hours and hours (days... weeks...) of their free time, plus hundreds of dollars, to battle against each other. Understandably, the game's fans tend to take it all quite seriously. The Army hopes to use this environment as a testing ground for its virtual soldiers, who will work to infiltrate the games and attempt to deceive the human gamers.
"Why?" you might ask, and we'd have to say in response: "Good question." This particular branch of the armed forces has already shown a penchant for video games, even 'World of Warcraft' in particular, so perhaps these games will form some sort of virtual battlefield of the future. [From: io9]
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Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsJSGNov 7th 2008 12:26PM
Wouldn't Blizzard consider this to be "botting"? It's my understanding that computer-run characters violate the End User License Agreement.
Otherwise, hey Army, I'll help you test it out. I'm sure your program would do a great job of running around mining ore for me, or farming honor points in the battleground.
StarsNov 7th 2008 2:51PM
SecondLife would be a way better environment for these sort of things. Except that the army would be way behind the technology curve vs. entities that have spent years developing weaponry.
sidewinder12sNov 7th 2008 5:24PM
the army might have gotten around that by going to Blizzard, since they are not trying to get any Gain from this other then testing programs to see if they can beat people