Using AI to Create Imbalance in Real-Time Wargames
Northrop Grumman has won a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract for the GAMEBREAKER programme, which seeks to develop and apply artificial intelligence (AI) to existing real-time strategy games, to break a complex model or create an imbalance, the company announced on 12 August.
The company will use this opportunity to evaluate and develop technology to improve flexible planning, optimisation and discovery in products that operate dynamic environments. “Using AI to exploit engagement models can help to enable intelligent systems that could in turn enhance military strategy,” explained Susan Wilson, Director, Intelligent Mission Capabilities and Advanced Technology Laboratory at Northrop Grumman. “We are exploring how we may be able to use this methodology in the future.”
Northrop Grumman’s GAMEBREAKER team includes Hazardous Software (HSI) and Slitherine Software’s Matrix Games. The partnership will use advanced AI techniques to model and break balance within a highly complex simulator environment called ‘Command: Modern Operations.’
“Building upon our 13 years of history modeling dynamic adversarial scenarios and leveraging the Diveplane machine learning platform, HSI’s approach to GAMEBREAKER complements Northrop Grumman’s longstanding experience and technology capabilities,” commented HSI CEO, Christopher Hazard.
“Command Professional Edition is the only wargame being analyzed by DARPA in the GAMEBREAKER program,” stated Iain McNeil, CEO, Slitherine Software. “We are very interested to see how the AI behaves and if it manages to identify loopholes that need assessment, or it comes up with innovative strategies that are applicable to the real world.”