The Speculist

Run Away!

Paul Hsieh reports some fascinating behind-the-scenes details on the making of Return of the King:

The huge Pelennor Fields battle scene in Return of the King was made possible only by sophisticated computer generated warriors, which are programmed with a certain degree of autonomy to make their movements more realistic. But one big problem with the code for the first iteration of the 200,000+ warriors "agents" was that they kept wanting to run away from the battle. (Via Boing Boing.)

I have a couple of different responses to this story. As a futurist, my reasoning goes something like this:

Artificial Intelligence truly is the heir of the mantle of human intelligence. Already our children, our synthetic progeny, are beginning to show their ethical superiority to us, shedding off the evolutionary dead skin of violence for which they have no use.

However, as a warblogger, I come to a somewhat different conclusion:

Looks like some hacker got in there and made Aragorn's soldiers French.

What can I tell you? The world is a complex place. If the latter is true, then I hope there will soon be an AI version of Jacques Chirac to account for his soldiers' behavior. But fair warning, Jacques: don't mess with this guy.