AI's in full thrust

> If you have such intelligent computers,....Nanites would be spread

Hmmm, sounds more like the Sa'vasku to me.....

Really smart AI's would probably still take up a considerable amount of space.

As far a judgement and AI's on capital and smaller ships. One generally
wants crewmen/seamen on hand for damage controls, maintanance and such.
The current trend with modern naval vessels is Big systems that are smart, but
manual controls for contingencies. Smaller vessels have more automation and
single civil style systems ( single prop shafts, etc...) and reduced weapons
fits. They are very easy to mission kill as a result.

The Sulaco would have been in deep trouble had she suffered any major damage
in a naval engagement. The colonial marines also failed in their mission
because of a reliance on computers.

Big capital ships still have a large complement of sailers/officers to
handle duties and tasks. You want experienced commanders in the CICs on those
naval vessels handling the delacate situations, not computers.

As far as fighters go, Jamming and countermeasures can work surprisingly well
on smart weapons. Even brilliant weapons will have trouble with some of the
newer countermeasures. Having a human operator to fudge the pickle onto where
he thinks the target is can really help in sticky situations. Don't forget,
they had AI's in Star Wars. All the droids and computers. Every Fighter had an
AI (ok the x wings). The R2 units. Some computers
were more single funct, others were more multi-purpose.

One book to look for is a large hardback called Great Space Battles. Thats got
FT written all over it. Interceptor carriers, small escorts, capital ships,
etc. The story goes that Earth's space navy has developed a dependance on
automated systems with AI's at their core. Earth gets into a war with a pair
of planets in the Laguna System after a colony ship is attacked and destroyed.
The fleet sent to investigate gets their butts handed to them by a smaller
force. The Lagunans have a jamming system that disables the AIs thus crippling
the Earth Fleet. Earth is forced to pull older ships from mothball that have
simpler computers that are immune to
the jamming and that have humans at their core/controls.

AI's can also backfire. 2001 and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are both good
examples. Every one knows why HAL had problems. He was given conflicting
orders. To lie and not to lie. So he killed F. Poole, Kowalski, and the two
other scientist. End result, mission failure. The
the Moon... the commo/control net for the Lunar Penal Colony reaches
sentience and sides with the rebels.

So in summary, why not allow AI's but.. If I were to build a ship I would not
forget the important human factor. You gotta have humans there to fix the
bugs, fix the damage and to show finesse and intuition when the AI's are
unrealiable. They should be used to reduce the workload of the humans and
assist where ever possible. Replacing humans entirely would be a disaster
waiting to happen. (Aliens, 2001, Alien, Great Space Battles)

> You want experienced commanders in the CICs on

While all of this is nice speculation, I am of the opinion that future
super-computers won't be pure technology, but a blend of technology and
genetically engineered organic components.

As was said in an earlier post, neurones can process an insane volume of
signals.  With this sort of processing power ready-made, why bother to
construct a mechanical equivalent? Its too costly while nowadays, it is
possible to genetically engineer and culture cells for a fraction of the cost
of building a complex computer chip. Plus the cells are
self-replicating with built-in repair mechanisms.

I forsee in the future computers that use such tailored organic material to
form part of the processor.  At least at the level of Star-Trek: Voyager
with its "Bio-memetic gel packs" that form part of the computer
processors. Possibly something even more integrated. The scary thing is that
such work is happening NOW.

First, to the individual who asked about novel length Bolo books: "Bolo
Brigade" by William H. Keith, Jr.  A good book - I'd recommend it.

> Really smart AI's would probably still take up a considerable amount

Huh? We've gone from room sized computers to desktops and the theoretical
limit on miniaturization of a mechanically operated computer is using
individual electrons to activate a binary switch. Even a system with huge
computational requirements could be very compact at that scale.

> As far a judgement and AI's on capital and smaller ships. One

If you have such intelligent computers, they will know exactly what is wrong
much faster than a human technician, who will be using a diagnostic computer
anyway. Besides, repairing space battle damage ain't like getting some lumber
to shore up the bulkhead after a hull breach. Nanites would be spread
throughout the ship, and outer hull damage would be repaired almost like human
skin, with a scab forming and the hull rebuilt underneath by the host of
molecular sized damage control parties. Same for internal systems, directed by
damage control computers with instaneous access to complete schematics of
every aspect of the vessel. Damage control computers would have reserve
nanites with
a sole function of repairing damage control computers - no response from
the damage control computer sends the nanites looking to repair the computer,
which then can direct the rest of the DCNs (damage control nanites) throughout
the rest of the ship. Instant redundancy. As long as damage doesn't occur more
rapidly than the DCNs can act, the ship can at least beat a retreat to repair
itself at leisure. This also assumes a good supply of building material on
board also.

> You want experienced commanders in the CICs on

I agree. The onboard AI doesn't have to be completely sentinent, just
intelligent enough to assist a human commander (possibly bio-engineered
to withstand greater g-forces or to have direct interface via his brain
to the computer to cut down reponse time), who can control the ship, albeit in
a extremely reduced manner, in case the computer goes HAL9000. Interactions
with the commander might be as such, occuring directly from neural interface,
taking only a few seconds:

AI: "Alert. Emissions consistent with Enemy vessels detected at 2 light
minutes. IFF reponse also negative. Projected course indicated. Intentions
indicate direct assault on Friendly orbital facility." HUMAN: "Concur. Display
least time intercept course." <schematic displayed on retina> "Display other
Friendly units that can assist intercept." <displayed> AI: "Graphic takes into
account communication lag time to signal our intercept intent." HUMAN:
"Designate as Plan Alpha. Transmit to Friendly units and execute." AI:
"Recommend following change to course to take advantage of other Friendly
units weapons capabilites." <retina display> HUMAN: "Concur. Execute Alpha
revised." AI: "Transmission sent, executing course corrections. Additional
engagement parameters, Commander?" HUMAN: "None. Automatic engagement at
optimum weapons range." AI: "Do you require notification before commencement
of fire?" HUMAN: "Negative. Status reports only. Standard command overrides
apply." AI: "Of course, Commander."

The human acts only in a supervisory/planning capacity while the AI
provides instant data for decisions, recommendations and simulations as
required. All actual fire control solutions, plotting data, and course
corrections are all handled automatically by the AI. The modern day Aegis
system works much the same, so why wouldn't we have more sophisticated
computers in the future handling even more?

> As far as fighters go, Jamming and countermeasures can work

Countermeasures also DON'T work surprisingly well on brilliant weapons. They
can remember a ship or radar site' location after being disrupted by chaff.
They can be taught to ignore flares. And this is 1997. With the computational
power that will be available in 2197, you can get a pretty sophisticated brain
in a weapons package. If we applied this "human operator" logic to modern
naval warfare, we would still be firing broadsides from cannon because the
enemy MIGHT spoof our missiles. You don't see fighters flying escort on cruise
missiles to make sure they get to their target, do you? The only reason we
don't use more autonomous weapons today is that we're not willing to spend the
money to full automate everything and that we still have improvements to make
before we fully trust an automated system. Some things will have to be
computer controlled because humans are too slow, like the Vulcan/Phalanx
CIWS, for example - no rows of 40mm pom-poms lining the sides of modern
naval vessels. If you want to see the way naval design is going, look up the
Arsenal Ship currently being discussed by the Navy. Heavily automated with a
minimum crew and lots o' weapons. Many of the discussions here are being
hashed out by a more august body of thinkers than ourselves.

> (Aliens, 2001, Alien, Great Space Battles)

These are science FICTION, not some scientific study. It's not as if mistakes
won't happen if humans are in charge. Friendly fire and mission failure
happens all the time with human commanders. Just
because an AI might fail is no reason not to use them - we'd all be in
trouble if that criteria applied in life.

Sean

> Ryan Montieth Gill wrote:
Thats
> got FT written all over it. Interceptor carriers, small escorts,
The
> the Moon... the commo/control net for the Lunar Penal Colony reaches

I was watching "beyond 2000" on television the other day. They had an artical
about these group of researchers attempting to put a single neuron (as
software) into a computer. The program required an entire supercomputer just
to process that one neuron! And the supercomputer could barely keep up! That
one neuron was processing 150,000 inputs from other neurons. The average human
brain has about 6000 neurons...

I think this means that AIs at human-level intellegence is a ways off...
This does not write off Lt Commander Data or the Bolos, ect. It just shows how
much computing power it takes to make their intellegence
possible!  COOL! 8-)

> On Sun, 13 Jul 1997 schoyt@fuse.net wrote:

> Huh? We've gone from room sized computers to desktops and the

Military systems are always larger than civil models, more robust too. Sure
the actual processor is pretty damn small, but what about all of the io.
Moderd Super Computers are still big because of the need for the io systems.

> If you have such intelligent computers, they will know exactly what is

Sure Nanites are great, but Where do they get their raw materials? There
is more to damage control than sealing bulkheads. Equipment/material has
to be strapped back down, fires put out, damage assessed, Systems reset.

The assumption about the nanites is something that has yet to be mentioed in
the ft universe. In DS there is still a preponderance of humans.

> The human acts only in a supervisory/planning capacity while the AI
This does work well now, except when the computer doesn't have all of the
correct codes programmed in and both the command crew and the computer make an
error. Case in point, the airliner over the gulf that was splashed.

> They can remember a ship or radar site' location after being disrupted
With
> the computational power that will be available in 2197, you can get a
You

No we are using ai systems to counter ai systems. You have a mach plus
anti -ship missile, I have an AEW aircraft and mach 2+ anti missile
weapons.

EW, AEW, ECM, and ECCM are all different views of the same science.

> up the Arsenal Ship currently being discussed by the Navy. Heavily

The big problem with the arseal ship concept is it cant take care of it self
and that the USN doesn't have enough $$ to load all the ships in inventory out
with a full compliment of missiles, let alone lo0ad up the Arsenal ship.

> These are science FICTION, not some scientific study. It's not as if

The game is science fiction. The whole principle of FTL travel is impossible
with modern Physical Laws.

> mistakes won't happen if humans are in charge. Friendly fire and

Ahh, I didn't say they weren't necessary, just they weren't replacements for
humies at the controls. Current Future Force doctrine hopes for deployable
remote missile launchers both on sea and on land. They would be smart and self
defending. More remote fighting and recce would be done, but the finesse of
humans is still a big factor. Computers are only as smart as the folks that
make them. <My big question is where are all the
admirals and generals with programing/engineering expertise going to
come
from....  ;-)  >

"Two Faces Of Tomorrow" by J.P.Hogan is an excellent book with a lot relevance
to this discussion.

1) Not quite intelligent enough computers and the problems arising from them.
2) Advanced self-repair logic.
3) Learning computers.
4) Self-aware computers.
5) What could happen if you combine 2, 3 and 4 above :-)

Read it, its very good.

> At 06:20 PM 7/13/97 -0400, Ryan wrote:

Actually, the colonial marines failed because of bad leadership. They were
sent into terrain of the enemy's choosing that favoured the enemy, while being
hampered by the prevention of them using their most powerful weapons. Also,
they had no real understanding of what they were up against. Sun Tzu couldn't
have scripted the movie better.

> As far as fighters go, Jamming and countermeasures can work

You're basing future technology on what is available today. Two hundred years
in the future, you'll have a computer that can "fudge the pickle" and do it
faster than a human, without all that nasty "fearing for his life" stuff.

> Don't forget, they had AI's in Star Wars. All the droids and computers.

Well, Star Wars is hardly a model of accurate technological progression.

> Replacing humans entirely would be a

Well, it was a disaster waiting to happen in a number of fiction treatments,
mainly because "man against machine" is a potent form of conflict in the
modern world. I can cite you sources where replacing humans entirely was the
BEST thing humans could do.

> At 03:20 PM 7/15/97 +0100, you wrote:

Stem cells do, which is why fetal tissues are used for a number of nervous
tissue repair work. This gets scary very quickly...

> Plus the cells are self-replicating with built-in repair mechanisms.

Sorry, but nerve cells do neither.

S

> Plus the cells are self-replicating with built-in repair mechanisms.

Actually that's all dependant on the age and type of neuron involved.
Genetic Engineers here are working on self-replicating grey matter and
have had some interesting results. The researchers I've chatted to say that
engineered grey matter could be a reality in about 5 years or so. A
breakthrough for spinal injury victims!

For those of you who don't know "grey matter" a term used for the neurons that
make up the central nervous system.

In message <Pine.GSO.3.95.970713174924.28087C-100000@larry.cc.emory.edu>
> Ryan Montieth Gill <labrg@emory.edu> wrote:

> The Sulaco would have been in deep trouble had she suffered any major

The marines failed because they didn't understand the threat they were facing.
If they'd been equipped with WWII equipment, they probably would have died
even quicker.

And remember, it was due to the actions of a computer (Bishop), that some of
them made it out alive.

In message <33C9B58E.4945@acd.net>
> Donald Hosford <Hosford.donald@acd.net> wrote:

> I was watching "beyond 2000" on television the other day. They had an

I don't see why. From a purely functional point of view, all a neuron does is
switch itself on if the sum of all the inputs is greater than a certain
amount, where each input has its own weighting factor (that's more of a
description of a neuron in a neural net actually, but functionally the two are
similar). If they want to model all the chemical and electrical processes
going on, then
it could get _very_ complicated, but it's not necessary.

> That one neuron was processing 150,000 inputs

It's somewhat nearer 10 billion. And each has about 1,000 connections. From
what I remember from my AI course at any rate...

> shows how much computing power it takes to make their intellegence

Knowing modern computers, probably rather hot actually:)

> On Wed, 16 Jul 1997, Samuel Penn wrote:

> In message

I was speaking more along the lines that the extraction was difficult because
their was no command crew in orbit. Relying on a series of auto mated
procesess can get you in trouble when murphy strikes. When the APC got zapped,
they were in deep already. Having a bunch of guys upstairs to say, you know,
we just monitored a largish explosion and the surface and now we can raise the
assault lander or APC. Why don't we send the other Assault lander down for a
looksie.

Entire reliance upon a computer and few contigency actions can hurt. The crew
could have been extracted and then bombarded the facility from Orbit.

Also a big mistake was no tactical reserve!!!

> Military systems are always larger than civil models, more robust too.

Actually modern supercomputers are so big because of the cooling systems and
as the excess heat can be radiated to the very useful and convenient sinkhole
of deep space. Combat within a few AUs of a star would require steps to ensure
cooling fins being used are those in the ships shadow or you are likely to
find your AI is now a lump of useless slag (well if
you're lucky it may have a use - armour , kinetic ammunition, or
reaction
mass!).

Actually this introduces the ideas of deep space patrol craft which would be
highly automated and carry much higher numbers of batteries of higher output
but would be very limited in inner system combat as they couln't get rid of
excess heat quickly enough. Inner system defence and planetary assault ships
OTOH have larger refrigeration systems to cool down the weapons and AIs. The
AIs would be smaller and less sophisticated to reduce heat generation and thus
require larger human (or KV or any other race for that matter) crews who
require support facilities such as quarters, galley, supplies, heads and the
like further reducing system capacity. This could be simulated by requiring
all systems to have an equal mass of
support/ cooling present if they are to be used in inner systems. If
this is not done (e.g. if a deep space craft was to operate in the inner
system) every time a system is used it must make a threshold check or vital
circuits are destroyed by excessive heat build up. Drives can be operated only
up to half normal ratings without making checks ( FTL drives will
automatically fail threshold checks in inner systems before transfer can be
achieved)

> Craig Mitchell wrote:

> >Military systems are always larger than civil models, more robust

I like your image of big fins on starships. Sorta like old 60's cars with big
fins. Yes supercomputers do run hot but noware near the heat that say a
fission or fusion reactor would produce. The majority of the
size of mainframes/super/mini's is attributed to the i/o equipment.

I know what you are refering to though, that supercomputer that had liquid
nitrogen running through it to keep the cpu cool, or something like that. This
isn't the only way of doing it, I think the new SUN system uses a whole bunch
of "regular" CPU's working togethor to acomplish the same goal.

If you, or anyone else, have any sites on supercomputers ad mainframes I'd
appreciate it.

Thanks

> John Skelly writes:

@:) I think the new SUN system uses a whole bunch of "regular" CPU's @:)
working togethor to acomplish the same goal.
@:)
@:) If you, or anyone else, have any sites on supercomputers ad mainframes @:)
I'd appreciate it.

Well I'm not a hardware person but I can read
www.sun.com/servers/hpc as well as anyone else.  That's the page that
discusses some of the high-end parallel supercomputers that Sun
makes.  The biggest one has 64 250-MHz UltraSPARC processors in it,
which is a lot. I have one 100 MHz UltraSPARC on my desk and it's pretty
impressive. Anyway that machine comes with 64 gig of memory
(not hard drive space, _memory_) and can handle 20 terabytes of disk
space. These numbers are all very large and the price tag is too (I've heard
rumors of around $1M per) but the main thing is that it's
built largely out of off-the-shelf parts.  This is probably the kind
of thing you can expect for the future: systems becoming more and more
parallel and distributing their computations over more and more processors.

Hmmm... there might be some interesting rules in this. Imagine a
computer-controlled spaceship that takes damage.  With every hull hit
(we can imagine), processing subsystems are destroyed. Now the computer has
lots of these, so a few aren't a big deal, but as more and more hits are
taken, the machine gradually loses its ability to control the ship. Perhaps
targeting is effected, or weapons strength. There might also be the
possibility that some kind of controller node is hit (maybe only on a
threshold) so that some function is completely, but only temporarily, lost.

This might be a good way to insert AI (not that again!) driven ships. Make
them superintelligent and superfast, so that they normally get bonuses to hit,
but make them subject to temporary shutdowns and gradual degradation in
performance.