Molon Labe-First of all, congrtulations. Your scores are awesome. IRT your frustration: While I can't speak for DARPA, I suspect that they are trying to see what solutions that the "experts" (i.e., the subsim crowd) come up with IRT this problem. Over the past 60 years, Operations Analysis (OA) has established the "textbook" solution to the particular trailing problems we are simulating. However, we are being asked to act as a "Red Team" or an alternative analysis group. By evaluating our tactics, DARPA can verify the OA solution.
Additionally, the scenarios we are being given, while simple, are dynamic. The presence of merchant traffic, false contacts and Kamikaze merchants adds a dynamic that OA would have trouble quantifying, but the trained human brain can deal with fairly easily. How we deal with these problems in a dynamic environment gives the programers some insight into how to teach the ACTUV to act. Remember the original "Star Trek" episode where the computer scientist integrated some of his brain onto the computer? As a group, we are kind of doing the same the same thing, helping to train the ACTUV computer to act/react in a dynamic environment.
As an aside, I'm pleased that DARPA is thinking "outside the box" in this endeavor. It is an excellent idea to crowd-sourcing this portion. I would hope that they continue the experiment.
|