Jeremy Hsu reports that the US Navy has been testing a large-scale swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. In the test, a large ship that the Navy sometimes calls a high-value unit, HVU, is making its way down the river’s thalweg, escorted by 13 small guard boats. Between them, they carry a variety of payloads, loud speakers and flashing lights, a .50-caliber machine gun and a microwave direct energy weapon or heat ray. Detecting the enemy vessel with radar and infrared sensors, they perform a series of maneuvers to encircle the craft, coming close enough to the boat to engage it and near enough to one another to seal off any potential escape or access to the ship they are guarding. They blast warnings via loudspeaker and flash their lights. The HVU is now free to safely move away. Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), points out that a maneuver that required 40 people had just dropped down to just one. “Think about it as replicating the functions that a human boat pilot would do. We’ve taken that capability and extended it to multiple [unmanned surface vehicles] operating together… within that, we’ve designed team behaviors,” says Robert Brizzolara. The timing of the briefing happens to coincide with the 14-year anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 sailors. It’s an anniversary that Klunder observes with a unique sense of responsibility. “If we had this capability there on that day. We could have saved that ship. I never want to see the USS Cole happen again.”
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05 2014, @09:06PM
I think that this is probably a very effective technique. It has been proven to work elsewhere.
Just look at Firefox, or GNOME 3, or even Debian if you want a really recent example.
All three were strong, popular open source projects at one time. Then hipsters invaded, bringing dumbass UI designs and systemd. They swarmed and swarmed until they got their way.
Firefox is near death as a project, with only about 10% of the browser market [caniuse.com], thanks to its UI being destroyed.
GNOME 3 has become the laughingstock of the open source desktop environments because of its shitty UI.
Debian is in the process of getting decimated thanks to the forced integration of systemd and GNOME 3. Many Debian users are now moving to Slackware, Gentoo or even FreeBSD. Like Firefox and GNOME 3 today, Debian will be pretty much dead as a project within a few years.
If a swarm of hipsters can destroy three global open source projects in short order using these swarm techniques, then I am convinced that it would work effectively against a smaller target.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05 2014, @09:10PM
Good analogy.
Another thing that should remind everyone of systemd is the Ebola epidemic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05 2014, @09:15PM
That is true. Anything that forces its way into an unwilling host, especially in a detrimental fashion or with harmful effects, can be considered a disease. Systemd is in fact an infection upon otherwise healthy Linux systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05 2014, @10:27PM
And all of you pathetic neckbeards who constantly bitch and whine about systemd instead of simply forking the damn thing are a disease as well, infecting our otherwise healthy board against its will with all your useless, annoying crying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @12:10AM
Systemd should only exist in a fork of Debian. Mainline Debian shouldn't include systemd. Problem solved.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday October 05 2014, @10:28PM
So what's the most effective techniques to spot hipsters? (when clothes or systemd/Gnome3/new-FF affection etc isn't available)