Soldiers imitate video game characters to outwit the military robot.

 

Naturally, we are confronted with a series of difficult questions as artificial intelligence begins to play an increasingly prominent role in our lives—for better or worse—in writing news and driving automobiles. The principal of them is: Could I fight an AI and defeat it? And how, if so?”

The code was recently broken by eight Marines. They discovered that acting like video game characters was the key.

The book titled "Four Battlegrounds: An excerpt from the book "Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" by Paul Scharre was shared on Twitter by Shashank Joshi, the defense editor at The Economist. In it, the author tells a story about how the U.S. military used soldiers to improve an AI system's ability to identify people. According to Scharre, the project's engineers flipped the script after six days of training the algorithm by having soldiers walk around. They placed the robot in the middle of a traffic circle and instructed the soldiers to approach it undetected.

None of the soldiers could be detected by the robot. Participants decided to move more like cartoon or video game characters than normal in order to defeat artificial intelligence.

“For 300 meters, two somersaulted; never got caught,” writes Scharre, citing a source named Phil, who is not named in the Joshi-posted excerpt of the book. Under a cardboard box, two hid. The entire time, you could hear them giggling.

You probably already guessed that another soldier field stripped a fir tree before pretending to be one.

After reading this anecdote, many Twitter users compared the cardboard box strategy to Solid Snake's most basic weapon in "Metal Gear Solid": a simple cardboard box that players can hide in to confuse both bipedal nuclear tanks and foot soldiers. That is one of the things that director Hideo Kojima of "Metal Gear Solid" predicted. In the meantime, you have unquestionably somersaulted well over 300 meters if you have ever played a Dark Souls game.

The military has come under intense scrutiny for its use of video games to train soldiers and promote itself to young people. Games have recently become a popular method for bringing AI systems up to speed in the United States and other nations like Israel. Humans, on the other hand, have more training than video games. Simply hide under a cardboard box when in doubt.