Symposium will teach AIs how to wage nuclear war

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers holds a symposium every year on Computational Intelligence and Games. Part of the symposium is a sort of "Turing Test" challenge, in which contestants program an AI to play a videogame. The objective is to try to trick a panel of human judges into thinking the AI is a human player.

This year's videogame is DEFCON, the brilliant nuclear war strategy game from indie developer Introversion.

A group of talented programmers will pitch their DEFCON bot against enemy bots in a series of one-on-one thermonuclear chess games. The winner is the programmer whose bot successfully annihilates its opponents and racks up the highest death count. IEEE is offering a $500 prize to the deadliest DEFCON AI bot competition winner.

This can't be a good idea. Having seen lots of science fiction movies, I know exactly how this is going to turn out: whoever wins, we lose. I urge the IEEE to rethink their choice of game. Perhaps Cooking Mama or Uno?

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