12/15/03

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Pacifist AI

Boing Boing has a link to to a story in the Montreal Gazette that details the special effects work in Peter Jackson's The Return of the King. Each of the 200,000 soldiers depicted in the Battle of Pelennor Fields relied on software code that determined his, her, or its actions from a number of possible martial moves. Because the soldier AI routinely caused the fighters to flee, the programmers had to effectively lobotomize the combatants to make the fight scenes work. Just wait until smart bombs develop a conscience. We'll have to go back to the dumb ones.

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