However, we know what we want the AI to do: confronted with the situation that faced Grant before Vicksburg in 1863 we want the AI to ignore conventional military wisdom and send its troops below the objective and conduct a lightening campaign that ends with the envelopment and surrender of the enemy forces. Likewise, in a simulation of the Korean peninsula in September, 1950, we want the AI to conceive of a daring amphibious invasion 180 miles behind enemy lines as MacArthur did.
We want an AI that understands the rules and the physics of its environment and yet can think outside of the box when necessary.
One of the books making quite a stir this summer is Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. The book describes the management style of Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s but that is not what is controversial. Rather it is the book’s description of Bill James’ Sabermetrics and how it throws conventional baseball wisdom out the window that is causing so much discussion around the ball fields of America. Bill James makes a very convincing case that 150 years of “common sense” baseball is completely wrong. Billy Beane, embracing the tenets of Sabermetrics has built a winning ball club for a fraction of the cost of his opponents. We want an AI that can come to the same counterintuitive, but correct, conclusions.
1 “Intelligent systems such as CGF must possess humanlike expertise in the military domain. Like a human or group of humans in a military organization they must be able to adapt and learn” - G. R. George and F. Cardullo. “Application of Neuro-Fuzzy Systems to Behavioral Representation in Computer Generated Forces”, Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation, Orlando FL, May 11-13 1999, pp. 575-585.
