In a hilarious case of life imitating art, a pair of US marines hid from an AI robot with the classicMetal Gear Solidtactic of climbing inside a cardboard box. Hideo Kojima is one of those creators with a reputation for predicting the future. However, soldiers hiding in a box is one thing fromMetal Gear Solidthat few people expected would come true.Metal Gear Solid’s cardboard boxgoes back to the original isometric 2DMetal Gearfrom 1987. If Snake was holding still, hiding in the box made him entirely undetectable to Guards and Cameras. While it’s always been something of a joke item, the Cardboard Box appeared in all the mainlineMetal Gear Solidgames. However, despite its popularity within the franchise, most soldiers would probably be suspicious of a mysterious cardboard box appearing in the hallway while their back was turned.RELATED:Metal Gear Voice Actor Teases a Potentially Major Reveal Coming SoonThat said, an AI is not “most soldiers,” and theMetal Gear Solidtacticreportedly proved effective at confusing a DARPA robot. As reported by Kotaku, The Economist’s defense editor Shashank Joshi recently shared some excerpts from the upcoming bookFour Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Written by defense expert Paul Scharre, the passage describes a group of eight marines tasked with sneaking up on an experimental military robot. Two of them decided to take a page out of Solid Snake’s playbook by hiding under a cardboard box, reportedly giggling the whole time.
It’s obviously funny to imagine real soldiers using a tactic fromMetal Gear Solidgames, especially when it’s one of the sillier ones. However, this story shows something interesting about the nature of artificial intelligence. According to the excerpt fromFour Battlegrounds, DARPA engineers spend six days training an AI robot to detect a group of eight marines. Then, on day seven, the researchers parked the robot in the center of a traffic circle and tasked the marines with touching the robot without it detecting them.
All eight succeeded, including the pair of marines using a strategy straight out ofMetal Gear Solid. Two other marines avoided detection by somersaulting 300 meters to the robot from where they started. A fifth marine covered himself with branches and “walked like a fir tree.” While humans would have seen through these tricks instantly, the AI only knew to look for humans walking, not somersaulting, dressing like a tree, or hiding in a box. Perhaps the robot might have fared better if DARPA trained it onHideo Kojima games.
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