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AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations (www.newscientist.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 83 points 8 months ago (12 children)

The 1983 movie WarGames. This is the computer's conclusion after simulating every possible outcome of Global Thermonuclear War.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Thank you so much I'm going to watch it!

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    I don't know if we're doing spoilers for 40+ year old movies, but

    spoilerIsn't this really its conclusion after being told to play tic tac toe against itself? Then it learned from that and applied it to its global thermonuclear war simulations.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    To be honest, I recognized the screenshot and know the summary of the movie but I haven't actually seen it.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    You should! Actually a pretty accurate depiction of hacking. He spends weeks war dialing every phone number in the range in order to hack the computer.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Story goes that Reagan got freaked out after watching the film and asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff if it'd be that easy to hack into the US military. After a week of looking into it came the answer: “no, the problem is much worse than that”, and fifteen months after having watched it signed the confidential directive "National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security", starting the implementation of cybersecurity measures in the country's institutions.

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  • [–] -2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I think you should rewatch it sometime. it plays all the games in it's catalogue, it's not just applying tic-tac-toe to chess. skilled players of tic-tac-toe can force a stalemate, the only stalemate in nuclear war is mutually assured destruction.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    It's admittedly been a while since last time I saw it, but I never mentioned chess. The suggestion to play chess in the screenshot is a callback to when the computer tries to suggest playing chess instead of global thermonuclear war earlier in the movie. The computer did not apply tic tac toe learnings to chess, and I never claimed it did.

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