Re: Fwd: SEC: UNCLASSIFIED:- ONLY IN AUSTRALIA - AKA The Roos strike Back

From: bltzlfsk <cwimbrow_at_...>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 17:28:08 -0000

As revealed by Dr. Anne-Marie Grisogono, head of the Simulation Land
Operations Division at the Australian DSTO (Defence Science and
Technology Organisation) in the publication Defence Systems Daily,
she did not "instruct developers to model the local marsupials'
movements and reaction to helicopters" because "groups of disturbed
animals might well give away a helicopter's position," nor did corner-
cutting programmers seek to save some effort by simply replacing
images of soldiers with images of kangaroos without modifying the
underlying instructions for their behavior. Programmers did add
animated kangaroos to the simulation, and they did accomplish this by
replacing the visual representation of soldiers with visual
representations of the hopping marsupials (while neglecting to remove
the weapons and firing behavior from these representations), but this
was all done out of fun (not necessity), and this humorous glitch was
discovered right away and not unwittingly (and embarrassingly)
displayed to a group of visitors (American or otherwise).
Additionally, as Dr. Grisogono related, "[S]ince we were not at that
stage interested in weapons, we had not set any weapon or projectile
types, so what the kangaroos fired at us was in fact the default
object for the simulation, which happened to be large multicoloured
beachballs."
So, it was neither programmers nor pilots who "learned a lesson" from
this one. If anyone, it was Dr. Grisogono, who has now learned first-
hand just how easily an innocuous anecdote can be transformed into
something sensational, and how quickly and widely it can be spread.
Received on Tue Jun 10 2003 - 17:28:08 UTC