Armchair Dragoons Forums
Wargaming => Professional Wargaming => Topic started by: bayonetbrant on August 10, 2020, 09:02:11 AM
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The planned session breakdown (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BF2MpUfS-GRHBwHfeQFGRFWQNMh6wK8mXQ3iFVpDjzM/htmlview?usp=sharing&pru=AAABc_yBXGk*yoV9zCJ2uA4aDQ2Pt53uBQ#)
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I'll be "there." Anyone else planning to attend? Trying to decide on attending the "social."
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I'll be "there." Anyone else planning to attend? Trying to decide on attending the "social."
I'll be listening in on a variety of the panels, but I'm not on the entire thing all 5 days, and the social is very much a long-shot for me
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I'll be "there." Anyone else planning to attend? Trying to decide on attending the "social."
I watched the opening/welcome session with Colonel Caffrey and then I watched the last session of the day in Room A, "Building Wargaming Capacity in the University." I'm looking forward to Dr. Sabin's keynote on Wednesday. When I saw bayonetbrant write a message in the chat, I almost replied, "The Armchair Dragoons are in the house!", but decided against it. :)
I also saw Brant and Sebastian Bae chatting, so maybe there will be a future episode of Mentioned in Dispatches with Mr. Bae? :fingerscrossed:
The social looked interesting, but I didn't attend. Did you decide to participate?
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We are definitely having Sebastian as a podcast guest this fall and it talked about it for a while now.
I did make it to the social for a little while, and so did blackndecker.
Since I'm working these sessions in around my day job, I can't be at every one of them, nor give my full attention to every one of them. But it's a whole lot better than the last few years when I couldn't go at all
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We are definitely having Sebastian as a podcast guest this fall and it talked about it for a while now.
I did make it to the social for a little while, and so did blackndecker.
Since I'm working these sessions in around my day job, I can't be at every one of them, nor give my full attention to every one of them. But it's a whole lot better than the last few years when I couldn't go at all
What was the online social like? I'm glad to read Sebastian will be a guest in a future Mentioned in Dispatches. Very cool.
My schedule doesn't allow me to watch the entire conference either. I hope to watch sessions I miss when they upload the recordings later. I'm very grateful they decided to put this online at no cost to the participants this year. It is one of the few positive consequences from the pandemic. As much as I have wanted to attend past Connections, there's no way I could afford the travel costs, so this opportunity to watch it online is great.
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I was only really "present" for about 35-40 minutes, as I was on a work conf call for my day job for the first part of it, and then had KP for the second part. But here's a snippet....
https://twitter.com/PG_Crdbl_Hlk/status/1293129867593220097
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The social was ok, although awkward at one point. It was mainly attended by people in the community who know eachother fairly well, some are "names" in the professional wargaming community and others were newcomers like myself. Mostly just those friends visiting and catching up. I find these a little hard to attend, being introverted and new makes it easy to spectate. Fortunately, the live Connections UK event I attended last year began to play out the same way, until one of the attendees approached and broke the ice. Led to a fantastic discussion with some other attendees and set a great tone. But again, that's me.
Adding some additional context for the tweet that Brant posted, the awkward bit was when one attendee at last night's social began to recount a war story about a previous game. A "video" was used to set the scene about Brazil and the speaker admitted he'd not known that the video depicted women during Carnival and the attire that Brazilian women might wear during that event. The speaker recounted that a game participant raised concern that video was unfortunate or inappropriate (I'm being delicate). If the conversation had stopped there as an example of some of the challenges of impromptu use of the internets during a game, then that would be one thing. But the discussion in the voice track continued to focus on other areas of Brazilian culture and women's attire (still being delicate).
The online chat had a few people really start to pipe up and encourage the conversation to move on, describing the content as inappropriate. I don't think the speaker or others were really following the chat. One chat participants flagged for the only (apparently) woman in the session to speak up...which led her to ask of this participant why she as the only woman should be the one to speak up. Ultimately, the discussion moved along. I punched out for dinner a short while later.
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Graham Longley-Brown's talk from this afternoon
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Graham's talk was excellent and built off of an already compelling presentation that he did at Connections UK in 2019. His use of the thought maps was genius and it really came through during the session. If people don't have his book, they should seriously think about grabbing it.
Today was a strong follow-up to yesterday's sessions, especially with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work's key note presentation. I hadn't seen it posted yet, but it is supposed to be up shortly. Several references to how different Chinese military writings/thinkers are approaching future warfare -- I STRONGLY hesitate to call alot of what Work described as doctrine -- and the role of wargaming in the Third Offset Strategy. Work noted that he'd wished he'd heard of the Connections community when he was in the Pentagon and he guessed that current leadership probably didn't either. Maybe if he gets another run in the Pentagon, he may come back and leverage the Connections community for broader good.
I skipped the session on the SIGNAL game to instead listen to the Finance wargaming discussion. A fascinating discussion of how the financial sector is using games and scenario exercises to stress test their organizations in a manner consistent with the Dodd-Frank legislation after the 2008/9 financial crisis. Noted that the financial sector now has ten years of experience in this area (at least) and that their professional "wargamers" are usually titled as crisis planning experts or as "event planners." One other interesting comment was that "red" often consists of the US Government.
John Hanley's discussion on the cycle of learning mainly focused on AI issues, but as usually he offered some brilliant context to the discussion. The money quote of the brief -- for me -- was his comment that one play of a game is not the game and that the cycle of learning required more than one play of a game. He also noted that the community has been essentially trapped in conducting variations of kriegsspiel, but that maybe AI can help with that. (I've butchered this badly, but it's what I took down hurriedly.)
Couple of other sessions, but not much to remark on. I didn't flip back and forth through meetings too much.
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I enjoyed the keynote. I watched part of the presentation on SIGNAL. GLB's talk was really good, but it seemed to be trying to cover too many different kinds of games instead of just focusing on analytical or training or exploratory or some specific type.
The talk on OSINT in AI was pretty crappy. I was looking for a lot more information on using open sources to actually calculate or inform information in a wargame, and they were using AI/ML to help interpret and categorize open source data on boat and aircraft movement to try and pick out military versus civilian craft
It's an interesting application of AI and machine learning but it had almost nothing to do with wargaming and very little to do with how you would incorporate OSINT into a war game. Two of the three questions I got to ask for mine and they were both focused on individual level information that can be pulled from open sources, and how things like GDPR will impact it
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The social was ok, although awkward at one point. ...which led her to ask of this participant why she as the only woman should be the one to speak up. Ultimately, the discussion moved along. I punched out for dinner a short while later.
Wow. Awkward in deed. Thank you for the recap, I appreciate it.
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John Hanley's discussion on the cycle of learning mainly focused on AI issues, but as usually he offered some brilliant context to the discussion. The money quote of the brief -- for me -- was his comment that one play of a game is not the game and that the cycle of learning required more than one play of a game. He also noted that the community has been essentially trapped in conducting variations of kriegsspiel, but that maybe AI can help with that. (I've butchered this badly, but it's what I took down hurriedly.)
Thank you for the recap of what you watched today. Very informative. I see some of the PowerPoints and presentation notes have been posted. I don't see anything leading to the recordings yet.
I was only able to watch John Hanley's session and I missed the first 7 or so minutes of that. I think you summarized his session well. I too liked it and agree, his remark about needing to play the game more than once is very insightful. I also thought it was interesting/funny when he started talking about big data. Peter Perla chimed in the chat, "big data works until it doesn’t. and that’s when it kills you".
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I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention
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I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention
That's fair. I do think think that the chat is almost like a second conference...there is fascinating stuff in there...hope it gets captured.
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I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention
That's fair. I do think think that the chat is almost like a second conference...there is fascinating stuff in there...hope it gets captured.
I've been cutting & pasting the chats for the sessions I'm in, but that's more for me than the public. Ping me later and I can send you what I've got, but I'm not planning to post them anywhere
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I found day three to arguably be more interesting than the first two.
Professor Philip Sabin's key note talk was excellent in many ways, leveraging the recent historical treatments and discussions about the Western Approaches Tactical Unit to make a variety of points about diversity and inclusion and the complexities of contemporary wargames compared to the past. Now, Phil moved through this talk at a typically fast clip, so I may not have gotten everything down accurately (he usually writes up his narrative, so I'm hopeful that will be made available). He gently wagged a finger at the need for greater diversity and inclusion in professional wargaming and in the Connections Community. He discussed the relatively easier task of the WATU staff in focusing on mainly a one domain fight and compared that with the greater complexity of modern warfare (although as an aside, i think the Royal Navy would argue war was pretty complex for them too, especially in comparison to their predecessors in WWI). Phil made a hard push that while AI is important it will never replace or substitute for games where humans are making decisions. He also expressed concern about those gaming efforts that are pushing for multiple hundreds of iterations as an exercise where we learn more about the design...than the issue. I'm a huge Sabin-fanboy, so I'm probably biased in saying that I think his talk will be among the very best...of the conference.
I attended John Curry's session on wargaming tactical cyber. This is one where the chat was maybe more interesting than the brief, although I've found Curry to be someone important to watch and follow. His briefings at Connections UK have been pretty interesting and he's prolific in the Wargame Development's The Nugget. He had an approach of having the participants identify the tactical wargame solutions/capabilities that they desired...have that lightly (my characterization) vetted by specialists...run the game with those capabilities added on...and see what worked well and what people wanted to explore more.
The James Fielder talk on Liminality in Wargame Design was a fun discussion of the role of fun in professional and training games. He's working out of Colorado State University and studying hobby gaming.
I switched over to Room B to listen to Chad Briggs "Design and Execution of Wargames in COVID-19" which offered some options for remote wargaming. I think room b had more going on with "distance wargaming" earlier in the day. The discussion was very useful for a classroom session.
Back to Room A for an absolutely fantastic, arguably better than Sabin's, talk by Sawyer Judge of CNA who was talking about the Wargaming Guild. A paper she wrote for her Georgetown masters thesis. This was a hard discussion to track because her talk and slides were brilliant, but you also had people like Perla, McGrady, Downes-Martin, Rex B, and Brant among other pretenders (me) chiming in on the chat. Her discussion broke down the art vs science debate and tried to break down how the two areas addressed the question of discipline. This is one of the other back alley arguments going on in the wargaming community...is wargaming a discipline or "just" a tool? (I also think the art vs science discussion is essentially a holy war between the two camps..."my wargaming is the only true wargaming!") Unfortunately, my internet provider &#^!ed the bed and my connection went out. I was able to fight my way back on, but missed the heart of her brief and caught the q&a. By that time the Perla and McGrady furies had subsided and they were highly complimentary.
A watched part of the Naval Postgraduate School's session on Wargaming the Tactical Edge...but bailed after about 20 minutes and tuned over to Alec Barker's Peering into the Future of the AI-enabled wargaming discussion. I got in and they were on Q&A, but it seemed like a thoughtful discussion about what we may all be dealing with. And again, a great discussion in the chat about the ethics of unshackled AIs and warfare.
Finally, there was a "new wargamer" event organized after the formal presentations. I attended with the idea that I'm more new then many others, but there was some good representation from undergraduate students and grad students and a hobbyist or two. A good takeaway is that many seemingly intimidating titans of the field are very approachable and wanting to engage with newcomers.
Brant probably has some better observations, but I'm fried after another day of Zoom.
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I've been cutting & pasting the chats for the sessions I'm in, but that's more for me than the public. Ping me later and I can send you what I've got, but I'm not planning to post them anywhere
Could you send me the chat for the Sawyer Judge session if you have it? And did she mention if there was a short term solution to getting access to her paper? I'd rather not journey down to Georgetown (although it might give me an excuse to visit the Labyrinth game store in the district) and spend time at a copier... I did enough of that in high school, undergrad, and grad school.
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I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention
That's fair. I do think think that the chat is almost like a second conference...there is fascinating stuff in there...hope it gets captured.
I have been copying and pasting the chat for the sessions I've attended as a text file, which right now, is four, so not much. If you want what I've saved, I'd be happy to share with you. Normally there is a save feature for the chat in Zoom, but it must be disabled because I don't it.
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I caught half of Sabin & all of Sawyer and nothing else.
I was barely in the new wargamer chat for very long bc of stuff here that needed doing
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I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention
That's fair. I do think think that the chat is almost like a second conference...there is fascinating stuff in there...hope it gets captured.
I've been cutting & pasting the chats for the sessions I'm in, but that's more for me than the public. Ping me later and I can send you what I've got, but I'm not planning to post them anywhere
Ha! I should read ALL the posts before I start replying. I see Brant has done the same as I have and he probably has a more comprehensive text file.
Brant, can I ping you for what you have too?
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I found day three to arguably be more interesting than the first two.
Professor Philip Sabin's key note talk was excellent in many ways, leveraging the recent historical treatments and discussions about the Western Approaches Tactical Unit to make a variety of points about diversity and inclusion and the complexities of contemporary wargames compared to the past....
Finally, there was a "new wargamer" event organized after the formal presentations. I attended with the idea that I'm more new then many others, but there was some good representation from undergraduate students and grad students and a hobbyist or two. A good takeaway is that many seemingly intimidating titans of the field are very approachable and wanting to engage with newcomers.
Thank you for your wonderful summary of the days events. I only watched Sabin's keynote speech and I agree, it was stellar.
I'm sorry to read your Internet connected fizzled out for a wee bit. Sounds frustrating to me. I'm looking forward to when the recordings are made available. After your description of Sawyer Judge's session, I'd like to watch the full recording. I find it disappointing people will argue over whether wargaming is an discipline or a tool, whether it is a science or an art. I think it can be all of those at the same time.
The new wargamer event sounds great. Probably not as nice as a face to face event and still a great way to chat with people you wouldn't normally have the opportunity to talk to.
Thanks again!
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I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention
That's fair. I do think think that the chat is almost like a second conference...there is fascinating stuff in there...hope it gets captured.
I've been cutting & pasting the chats for the sessions I'm in, but that's more for me than the public. Ping me later and I can send you what I've got, but I'm not planning to post them anywhere
I have been able to catch the keynote then off to work ... Friday is my RDO so I am hoping to spend the morning listening to hot washes et al.
I really wanted to ask sec work if he had heard of Iowa ANG’s DTOC when I saw his stuff mentioning Shriever’ DSPOC.
I was fascinated by his discussion about using AI/ML agents as force enhancers with appropriate levels of MITL to allow the human traits of innovation and spontaneity to lead the “orchestra” ... I thought mr Sabin navigated that topic masterfully and made some salient points.
anyway, very interesting, wish I could participate more ... but, this week was not a good time to take any time off. I hope most of the sessions get posted.
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Thanks guys for sharing your highlights.
Did anyone attend the Slitherine presentations? What was the discussion like (if any)?
... I thought mr Sabin navigated that topic masterfully and made some salient points.
Such as?
Thanks again!
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Did anyone attend the Slitherine presentations? What was the discussion like (if any)?
I didn't, no. I'd seen the Command presentations at Connections UK last year and in 2018. And my focus is more on manual than computer...
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if y'all shoot me a PM here with the email you want me to send notes to, I can do that.
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as a side note, I accidentally discovered today that the "Otter" app that ships w/ a lot of phones does a REALLY good job of transcribing voice, even when it's on Zoom.
I was going to dictate some stuff but still had COL Boyd's talk in the background and it started picking up his remarks, and did a very good job of catching almost everything he was saying.
You might could just pull up a voice recognition app and set it next to your monitor while you're watching the sessions and let it transcribe for you.
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Been a very good Connections so far. A few fuzzy talks/sales pitches, the pervasive split between IA/Sims folk and adjudicated games, We had a good Flashpoint Campaigns Pro Demo yesterday afternoon and Jeff has one session this afternoon and one tomorrow on our Data and ML work we are doing these days. Miss the in-person ability to talk to folks, but that is offset with the pants-free zoom options. :bigthumb:
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Been a very good Connections so far. A few fuzzy talks/sales pitches, the pervasive split between IA/Sims folk and adjudicated games, We had a good Flashpoint Campaigns Pro Demo yesterday afternoon and Jeff has one session this afternoon and one tomorrow on our Data and ML work we are doing these days. Miss the in-person ability to talk to folks, but that is offset with the pants-free zoom options. :bigthumb:
and the "don't quit your day job" options :)
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... I thought mr Sabin navigated that topic masterfully and made some salient points.
Such as?
Thanks again!
I don't want to speak for rickbill. I will let them answer what they feel were the salient points. Here are the main points I got from Dr. Sabin's discussion. I'm hope blackndecker, brant, Capn Darwin and whoever else attended will provide their input too.
Just a heads up: I have not been taking close notes as I watch the discussions, so my input may not be the best. With that disclaimer out of the way...
In my opinion, the main points Dr. Sabin made are:
- Don't remove the human element from wargaming.
- Don’t get caught up in huge amounts of data collection
- Don’t get caught up in artificial intelligence, (AI) and machine learning, (ML).
Dr. Sabin proceeded to make his points, (there were 5 points in total), by examining an old wargaming system from WW II and why it was successful, to modern wargaming systems of today with AI and ML and why they are good at modeling some situations and are not good for a lot of other situations.
Dr. Sabin started by describing the successful Western Approaches Tactical Unit, (WATU). Dr. Sabin described how the environment and conditions allowed WATU to be successful. Mainly because all the information they needed was available and could be modeled consistently. He said that many of today's wargames, both in the hobby community and professional world continue to try to follow the older wargaming systems, even though those systems is not appropriate for what is happening today. There are too many variables and unknowns and it is not possible to model all of that based on older systems.
Dr. Sabin briefly discussed how many of today's wargames are not trying to model what is happening today with asymmetrical warfare, or for a lack of a better term, (propaganda just doesn't seem adequate here), what I would call social media warfare and political influence warfare. I immediately thought of all the COIN games and the discussion about whether COIN games are wargames or not. I'm digressing...
Dr. Sabin gave examples of modern events and why they are different and more complicated than WATU's mission. The two I remember best are China's and Russia's influence, both directly and indirectly in the world today.
Enter AI and ML to help deal with all the variables. I am not involved in the defense industry, so I'm not aware of all that is happening regarding AI/ML. I get the very distinct impression after watching some Connections 2020 presentations there is a big push to incorporate AI and ML into wargaming. Colonel Brad Boyd's presentation this morning, (Aug. 13th), brought that point home to me with his mantra of having everything be "AI ready" to capture all the data needed for AI to be successful.
Back to Dr. Sabin’s points showing the pros and cons of AI/ML. In my opinion, Dr. Sabin's talk stressed the weakness of AI, ML and big data in today’s situations. Unfortunately, I did not write down every one of his points as he described them. Here are some of the items I did write down:
- Today's wargame AI might work well for the older WATU system; however, they are not good at today's complicated situations of asymmetrical and cyber warfare/influence
- AI is very rational. This makes it ill equipped to find new and unexpected ways of finding solutions because it lacks ingenuity and has limits
- AI and ML can be useful. AI and ML can not replace the human element of wargaming and should only be used in a supporting and supplemental fashion
Finally, a comment Dr. Sabin made that still resonates with me is, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
For those that also watched Dr. Sabin’s keynote, if I’m off base, or I missed an important point, please let me know. I hope this was helpful. :)
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Really disappointed in the working groups this afternoon. 20-30 minutes in the education group, and felt like trying to run in quicksand. Ditched that to hop over to the wargaming innovation group, and it felt like they were finding every nit to pick instead of talking big picture. 10 minutes of that and I was out of that one, too. By then I was too close to a 4pm work meeting to try my hand at working-group-roulette and just bailed for the afternoon.
The working groups are often an enjoyable part of the conference, but man, the ones today just hurt
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Really disappointed in the working groups this afternoon. 20-30 minutes in the education group, and felt like trying to run in quicksand. Ditched that to hop over to the wargaming innovation group, and it felt like they were finding every nit to pick instead of talking big picture. 10 minutes of that and I was out of that one, too. By then I was too close to a 4pm work meeting to try my hand at working-group-roulette and just bailed for the afternoon.
The working groups are often an enjoyable part of the conference, but man, the ones today just hurt
I was in the wargaming and innovation session. Seemed like the group had met a couple of times beforehand and ironed out the main ideas of a presentation, and then the broader group that was from the conference dialed in and offered some suggestions and tweaks. Working group's aren't a feature at Connections UK, so I don't really have the same experiences you've had...but i thought this model worked. But that could also be due to the facilitators...
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Day 4
Overall I thought day 4 went well and that there were several interesting talks, some rivaling the quality of the chats. The session was led off by a COL Boyd (not that Boyd) from the Joint AI Center who spoke about the state of JAIC's efforts...but I thought also offered some good cautionary language and expectation management on how AI can or cannot play into wargaming. Boyd commented that the Data and modeling for AI enabled wargaming doesn't exist (yet). Comments in the chat included Anne Johnson's observations that people needed to be cautious about data collection and curation and that not all data was transferable. Laura Bosco noted that the AI push highlights a rush to get to an answer before really reflecting on what the question should be. Dr Wong argued that we should worry less about trust in AI conversations...and worry more about overtrust.
Peter Williams' (AUS DSTG) briefed about wargaming influence and grey zone operations. It looked like a fairly complicated array of models looking at a bunch of issues across the DIME. There was a fairly healthy chat about whether we understand the nature of influence, with Dr. Wong warning of the dangers of mirror imaging western concepts of influence on non-western countries. Rex Brynen commented that influence is less like a button or a lever and more like pushing on a string. Dr. Wong dropped the mic on the chat with "Building a complex model on a phenomenon you don't understand is the 1,000% solution."
Peter Pellegrino gave an outstanding presentation offering a taxonomy for distributed wargaming (ie, how to do wargames in a socially distant way) in the current era. There was a lot here. He focused on the geographic spectrum, time separation, network classification, and different tools. He noted there was a real risk of the facilitator losing control of various clusters that he didn't have people "in" or overseeing. Great discussion about how the current era and distributed gaming could allow for better practices to game/model C3 friction. Kriegsspiel discussed by some. Also led to the handy quote "SME on SME violence." Stealing that.
Marc Gacy gave a very good presentation on Conscious and Unconscious Priorities in Referee Adjudication. His main areas of focus were on players, characters, story, world, and system. Some key personalities in the community were having issues with trying to figure out where to place the "sponsor" in the dynamic. For me, I found the end of the chat to be highly frustrating because the presentation seemed to be dismissed as relating to the hobby or entertainment areas because of the lack of discussion of sponsors. This is maddening to me, because it suggested that sponsorless games are not professional (this was implied strongly)...which is frankly obtuse and ignores the comments from Jacquelyn Schneider (Stanford).
The final sessions I attended were Turnitsa's talk on the Wargaming Process and Metrics for a Successful Wargame AND Sugden's Preparing fro ML... i flipped back and forth between the two.
Lastly, they had multiple working group sessions today. I sat in on the innovation discussion. That will be outbriefed tomorrow. Also, Dr. Wong is updating interested parties on the status of her effort to establish a network for women in wargaming. I'll sit in on that too.
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The focus on "sponsor" has one, and only one, perpetual cadence drummer
He was very vocal in this sponsorness in the chat.
It's obvious that he cannot conceive of any sort of professional focused game that does not include an external sponsor (who has zero understanding of what wargaming is and what wargaming does.)
He's also been like that for a decade
Now, it is doubtless shaped by his professional experiences and the challenges he's faced in wrangling these things for a living. But he frequently projects his experiences on the population as a whole in spite of significant evidence repeatedly provided to him to the contrary
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Marc Gacy gave a very good presentation on Conscious and Unconscious Priorities in Referee Adjudication. His main areas of focus were on players, characters, story, world, and system. Some key personalities in the community were having issues with trying to figure out where to place the "sponsor" in the dynamic. For me, I found the end of the chat to be highly frustrating because the presentation seemed to be dismissed as relating to the hobby or entertainment areas because of the lack of discussion of sponsors. This is maddening to me, because it suggested that sponsorless games are not professional (this was implied strongly)...which is frankly obtuse and ignores the comments from Jacquelyn Schneider (Stanford).
Thank you for the kind words! I looked over the comments after the talk and was mildly perplexed by that discussion. To me, the sponsor and their desires sound like they sit squarely within "story." If sponsor wants a foregone conclusion, that's a classic railroading situation where the points of the story drive the action and outcomes, regardless of other factors.
- Marc
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Welcome to ACD, Marc! :bigthumb:
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Welcome to ACD, Marc! :bigthumb:
Marc also joined us as a GM for the virtual assembly. He had the skirmish level Shakos game
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This is maddening to me, because it suggested that sponsorless games are not professional (this was implied strongly)...which is frankly obtuse and ignores the comments from Jacquelyn Schneider (Stanford).
This was an incomplete thought...I'd meant to add that Jacquelyn Schneider had specifically discussed non-sponsored wargaming during her comments in a panel discussion on Monday.
To Brant's point on the strongest pusher of the sponsor issue...you're probably right.
At any rate, Marc, nice presentation. I'm planning on leveraging your points for some internal work!
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Thanks guys for sharing your highlights.
Did anyone attend the Slitherine presentations? What was the discussion like (if any)?
... I thought mr Sabin navigated that topic masterfully and made some salient points.
Such as?
Thanks again!
I think Tolstoi summarized them VERY well.
I agree, about the models comment ... it ACTUALLY made it onto my quote board at work!!
I think Mr Sabin suggested that what we should be doing is teaching warriors of the future how to harness the power of AI to do subtasks but the overall strategy and tactics either by red or blue forces needs the human touch. I do believe he also pointed out that there needs to be preparation for either the chinese or russians integrate AI/ML into their approach in an attempt to overwhelm.
Col Boyd this morning made a similar remark I thought was excellent ... he said J7/J8 orgs should be focused on using existing tech to solve the easier issues and leave it to DARPA and AFRL to "look in the dark alleys".
As he said, we are still trying to solve the problem which board wargamers seldom encounter ... Situational Awareness in true combat still leaves the participants trying to fight the battles with 50-70% (my guesstimate) of the combat situation being unknown or misunderstood. Wargames designers try hard to hide info ... professional warriors try hard to reveal ...
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Okay, so which one of you is writing the core of our upcoming AAR article?
Happy to help shepherd along as the editor, but you guys have been in far more of the sessions than I have, and paying more attention
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At any rate, Marc, nice presentation. I'm planning on leveraging your points for some internal work!
I couldn't ask for a higher complement!
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Okay, so which one of you is writing the core of our upcoming AAR article?
Happy to help shepherd along as the editor, but you guys have been in far more of the sessions than I have, and paying more attention
***cricket chirping sound***
Okay, all kidding aside, I only actively watched 8 out of the 50+ sessions during last week. I don't think that qualifies me to write more than part of an executive summary, at best. I do not feel comfortable writing the AAR. I am happy to collaborate with anyone who is willing to write it.
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Send over a paragraph or so of your thoughts. I've got someone writing the primary article and about a half dozen people contributing to it
Thanks!
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Okay, sounds good. I will get it to you sometime this week. :bigthumb:
Send over a paragraph or so of your thoughts. I've got someone writing the primary article and about a half dozen people contributing to it
Thanks!
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https://www.armchairdragoons.com/feature/connections-conference-2020-an-aar/
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https://www.armchairdragoons.com/feature/connections-conference-2020-an-aar/
Thanks very much for putting this AAR together, guys. Very helpful.
Second, the idea of AI acting as an %u2018independent thinker%u2019 was a common thread, as would be expected at a conference that was focused on AI throughout. One of the constant refrains was the idea of trying to get the AI to act %u201Crationally%u201D or within some nebulous expectations that would approximate human behavior. However, as several audience questions and comments pointed out, the cultural %u201Clens%u201D through which the AI was programmed to act was of enormous %u2013 and undervalued %u2013 importance. What is considered %u201Crational%u201D or %u201Cnormal%u201D or %u201Cexpected%u201D to one culture might be evaluated very differently by another culture. How an AI might evaluate varying courses of action available to different actors within a wargame could be dramatically impacted by the cultural assumptions built into the menu of options available to the AI.
This is indeed a challenge and an opportunity.
A challenge, because biases like "those guys won't ever do X because we wouldn't" can seep undetected into, not just the data/knowledge that drives the AI, but also the game mechanics themselves (as the range of outcomes becomes limited to "sensible" ones). Since ML-powered AI will draw from both data/knowledge and the "rules" of the game, its behaviours will be guaranteed to not being a good predictor for the behaviours of others (which is what wargaming actually is about, in my opinion). Tracing back the source of a specific behaviour is in general not possible for ML-heavy approaches.
To avoid this I think the only way is to build up from "first principles", the challenge lies in finding the computational power to scale up. See for instance
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-35288-2_1
for a serious attempt at having AlphaZero to come up with "superhuman" strategies on a war game. I don't know if there are similar works out there, if anybody knows a reference, I would appreciate them sharing.
Finding a minimal set of first principles to capture in your rulesets I think is always a good target when designing war games. Hence the interest in Kriegsspiel, for instance, where you have a "barebones" simulation, which would be the "minimal credible war game".
It is also an opportunity because an algorithm running on a computer doesn't have feelings, and can develop strategies to their logical conclusion, regardless of our cultural expectations. Which may lead to us not "trusting" the results, as they are "strange". Trusting autonomous systems is not just about they calculating the right thing, but also of training the humans to recognize what is that "right thing".
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I don't want to speak for rickbill. I will let them answer what they feel were the salient points. Here are the main points I got from Dr. Sabin's discussion. I'm hope blackndecker, brant, Capn Darwin and whoever else attended will provide their input too.
Just a heads up: I have not been taking close notes as I watch the discussions, so my input may not be the best. With that disclaimer out of the way...
<SNIPy>
Thanks very much for the detailed summary @Tolstoi!, I didn't get notified of your response even if I see that I am allegedly subscribed to the thread.
I do not think anybody in the defence side is seriously considering removing the human element in war gaming (hard to do that in the first place when the intent is to use it for training or as a support tool for appropriation or doctrine development). Also, a "human someone" needs to program those AIs and the simulators/games they operate on.
- Today's wargame AI might work well for the older WATU system; however, they are not good at today's complicated situations of asymmetrical and cyber warfare/influence
- AI is very rational. This makes it ill equipped to find new and unexpected ways of finding solutions because it lacks ingenuity and has limits
- AI and ML can be useful. AI and ML can not replace the human element of wargaming and should only be used in a supporting and supplemental fashion
Of the three points, I think the third one is pretty much obvious to any sane participant. There may be insane people out there, or who hype stuff in a irresponsible manner, but in my interactions with defence organizations, I haven't come across any.
The second point is just not true.
An AI isn't "rational", is "programmed to be rational". This programming can be direct, as when you write down rules for developing course of action (as we did in Command Ops for instance). Or it can be indirect, by having data tagged as "right" or "wrong". Any "rationality" in an automated system is bounded by its inputs, and those inputs are chosen/designed by humans. Hence why I think the reflection of "garbage in, garbage out" was a very good take away point from the conference.
Regarding being ill-equipped to find new and unexpected ways of solving a problem, I would say that if we're looking at "first principles" systems, we already know we can be shocked and awed by what AI systems can come up with. For instance, see Lee Sedol's remarks on the style of playing he perceived Alpha Zero to develop. For systems where a lot of knowledge is programmed to determine the behaviour of the autonomous system, indeed, you won't get anything innovative because you're not allowing the system any freedom in exploring possibilities.
The real limitation is the that the price of "innovative" AI can be prohibitive (it took nearly a year to a community effort to scrape together enough computing power to construct an AlphaZero-like system that was able to beat Stockfish). The state-of-the-art isn't simply there to allow for the success of AlphaZero to be replicated on every problem we want/need to solve, without significant effort.
For the first item, I am not sure how you would capture asymmetrical and cyber warfare in a wargame in a way that would make it out of reach of a "first principles" AI system without making it also out of reach for humans.
I was expecting to disagree more with Sabin. Very interesting, and many thanks for taking the time to put this together Tolstoi!