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"A military situation at its worst can inspire fighting men to perform at their best."
- Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent
"In Korea the Government forces, which were armed to prevent border raids and to preserve internal security, were attacked by invading forces from North Korea....The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war."
- President Harry Truman
"East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century."
- William C. Kirby
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"Go" (or paduk for my Korean friends) is a tough game.
The problem with the Army's 'Go' metaphor - besides being 2,500 years old
c4isrnet.com · by Kelsey Atherton · November 20, 2019
When it comes to plotting the future of artificial intelligence, the military has a metaphor problem. Not a metaphorical problem, but a literal one based on the language used to describe both the style and the structure of the AI threat from abroad.
The problem, narrowly put, is an over-reliance on the board game "Go" as a metaphor for China's approach to AI.
The board game Go, which was first played in ancient China somewhere at least 2500 years ago, is about positioning identical pieces on a vast board, with the aim of supporting allies and capturing rivals. Just as chess can be seen as a distillation of combined arms on the battlefield, Go's strength is in how it simulates a longer campaign over territory.
Also, like chess, Go has become a popular way to demonstrate the strength of AI..
The Google-funded AlphaGo project beat professional human players for the first time without handicap in 2015, and beat a world-class champion 4-1 in a five game match in 2016. That AlphaGo took longer to create than the chess-playing Deep Blue speaks mostly to the complexity of possible board states in the relative games; that Go has 361 spaces while chess has 64 is no small factor in this.
For AI researchers, building machines to match games with fixed pieces in a fixed space is a useful way to demonstrate learning in constrained problem sets. But there is little in the overall study of the games that informs strategic thinking in anything more than just a rudimentary level, and that's where the problem with the metaphor could lead to bad policy.
At the 2019 Association of the United States Army symposium on AI and Autonomy in Detroit, multiple speakers on Nov. 20 referenced Go as a way to understand the actions of China, especially in light of strategic competition on the international stage. Acting Under Secretary of the Army James McPherson discussed Go as an insight into China's strategic thinking in his keynote, and that sentiment was echoed later by Brandon Tseng, Shield AI's chief operating officer.
"The Chinese are playing Go, which is about surrounding, taking more territory and surrounding your adversary," said Tseng, speaking on a panel about AI and autonomous capabilities in support of competition.
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Tseng went on to describe the role of AI as an answer to the problem of remotely piloted vehicles in denied environments. Finding a way for robots to move around electromagnetically denied environments is an undeniable part of the drive
behind modern military AI and autonomy.
But we don't need a Go board to explain that, or to cling to the misunderstood strategic thinking of the past. Thinking that Go itself will unlock China's strategy is a line pushed by figures ranging from former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich to former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger. The notion that the United States is playing chess (or, less charitably, checkers) while its rivals play Go has been expressed by
think
tanks, but it's hardly a new idea. The notion that Go itself informed the strategy of rivals to U.S. power was the subject of a
book published in 1969, as an attempt to understand how American forces were unable to secure victory in Vietnam.
In the intervening decades since Vietnam, humans and algorithms have gotten better at playing Go, but that narrow AI application has not translated into strategic insight. Nor should it. What is compelling about AI for maneuvering is not an unrelated AI in an unrelated field tackling a new game. What is compelling is the way in which AI can give opportunities to commanders on battlefields, and for that, there's a whole host of games to study instead.
If the Army or industry wanted to, it could look instead and the limited insights from how AI is
tackling Starcraft. But when it makes that leap, it should see it as a narrow artificial intelligence processing a game, not a game offering a window into a whole strategic outlook.
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De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
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