Pentagon-Funded ‘Fun to Play’ Games Would Crowdsource Weapons Testing
January 20th, 2012Via: Nextgov:
The Pentagon plans to fork over $32 million to develop “fun to play” computer games that can refine the way weapons systems are tested to ensure they are free from software errors and security bugs, according to a Defense Department solicitation.
The goal is to create puzzles that are “intuitively understandable by ordinary people” and could be solved on laptops, smartphones, tablets and consoles. The games’ solutions will be collected into a database and used to improve methods for analyzing software, according to the draft request for proposals put out by the military’s venture capital and research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
As weapons systems have become complex, the military’s methods for verifying that the software running on them is glitch-free and secure against hackers has fallen short. Formal verification is the process analysts use, through the application of mathematical theories, to determine if software code is free from bugs. Crowdsourcing this complicated task would help the Pentagon cut costs while it grapples with a shortage of computer security specialists.
“Formal verification has been too costly to apply beyond small, critical software components,” the document said. “This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the size of software found in modern weapon systems.”
DARPA’s three-year experiment, known as Crowdsourced Formal Verification, will address the question: How can developers translate formal verification problems into compelling puzzles people will want to solve?
The agency estimates that it will spend $4.7 million on the project this year.
A population of complacent guinea pigs…
* Involuntary vaccination policies
* Covert weapons-system testing
* Guilty until proven innocent
* Etc, etc, etc…
I have long shy’d away from the term “sheeple” to describe the behavior of programmed individuals in mass society, largely because it smacks of the very elitism behind the game playing out, but I’m at the point of reconsidering my self-imposed ban the way things are trending lately…
“Shiny, happy people designing genocidal machines”
I’m just waiting for the start-ups to proudly boast that they are free=death-supported, as opposed to free=add-supported.
The phrase’wisdom of the crowds’ really does just about make me hurl.
Miraculix: Child vaccination came up the other day and I mentioned the AMA’s proposal to make vaccination testing voluntary. A co-worker thought it sounded like a good idea and was ready to volunteer his own children.
It was the sort of moment where you realize that you have no common ground for discussion about the matter at hand, and you just want to disengage as rapidly as possible.
It’s slightly scary that people here are nuts. It’s much scarier that they can’t see that they might be nuts.
(…)
I’ll just say from a development standpoint, having been closely associated with a product that followed the ‘crowd wisdom’ model, I suddenly find myself much more interested in bomb shelters.
Of course, there’s the double-double-paranoid perspective that this is just a social-engineering effort to induce a sense of personal involvement throughout the US population with the war effort. “That’s my football team.” “Those are OUR bombs; we helped design ’em!”. Perceived personal involvement skews perspective and tempers criticism. If the effect of flag-waving wanes, well, why not make us all feel like we have a finger on the button?
Zeke