If you are a fan of the series Metal Gear SolidHideo Kojima’s iconic video game franchise, you will have repeatedly enjoyed the technique or meme of the box, ideal for outwitting soldiers, sliding downhill and surprising your enemies. Not even modern artificial intelligence (AI) can beat the cardboard box in real life.
We are not talking about a simulation within Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain or Metal Gear Survive, we are talking about a group of marines used the cardboard box meme to outsmart the AI of a military robot.
According to a report published on the website of gizmodo that Shashank Joshi, a journalist from The Economist and specialized in finance related to defense departments, cited a book written by Paul Scharre and entitled “Four battlefields: power in the age of artificial intelligence” that mentions the anecdote.
The book will be available in English on January 28 and reflects on the social, political and economic changes that are coming as a result of the use of artificial intelligence systems. In one of its passages, the text tells what happened when the Army high command asked a group of eight marines to try to outwit a robot equipped with a modern AI-based people detection system.
What exactly did the Marines do?
The Marines helped a team of engineers from DARPA (the United States Army’s Advanced Projects Agency) to improve the artificial intelligence of a robot by performing different activities around a camera system so that the algorithms learned to detect human beings.
After six days, they asked the soldiers to try to circumvent the system. They placed the robot inside a circle and the martins had to approach the device, touch it and not be detected.
They all made it, but the curious thing is in the shapes, including one in which a marine got inside a box, Metal Gear Solid style.. Who would have thought that a meme-turned video game technique would outperform an AI-powered military robot.
