Metal Gear Solid was a documentary: soldiers use cardboard box to sneak past AI

In a bizarre example of life imitating art a new book on AI has revealed how hiding under a cardboard box really is the future of warfare.

Considering how much utter nonsense the Metal Gear games are filled with – from vampire mercenaries to the La-li-lu-le-lo – they’re also remarkably prescient about future technology.

Not just the famous ending of Metal Gear Solid 2, which managed to predict the modern era of fake news way back in 2001, but the use and importance of military drones and… cardboard boxes.

In fact, hiding under a box may be more important than even Hideo Kojima realised, according to a new book on the current state of artificial intelligence.

From the earliest games, hiding under a cardboard box and creeping around enemy bases has been one of the most iconic elements of the Metal Gear series, and one that’s usually pretty effective if you don’t move when someone’s looking.

A new book called Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial, by Paul Scharre, discusses an experiment involving DARPA (another regular subject for the games) testing out a new robot designed to detect people.

An excerpt shared online discusses how DARPA got a group of US Marines to try and outwit the robot, by putting it in the middle of a traffic circle and seeing if anyone could reach it without it detecting them.

The Marines quickly worked out that the robot was only looking for human shapes and movement and so ignored traditional camouflage in favour of whatever gave them a non-human shape, like… hiding under a cardboard box.

Supposedly this worked perfectly, and the robot completely ignored two of them, despite the fact that they could be heard loudly giggling the whole time.

Another Marine, presumably a fan of the Scottish play, pretended to be a tree by sticking fir tree branches all over himself and just walking up to the robot.

Then, finally, two other Marines ‘somersaulted for 300 meters’ to get to the robot. Which not only sounds exhausting but exactly the sort of thing that would happen in a Metal Gear game.

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