Chapter 73 13.7 A hyper-reality with thousands of fragments

The army is the winner, the mob is the loser.Rambo, who walks alone, will eventually die.The military knows better than anyone that the most important thing is how to make the team work well.It's the team that turns the mob into an army and Rambo into a soldier.Colonel Thorpe was right: Distributed intelligence, not firepower, wins wars.Other visionaries have made the same assertion for the company of the future."The next breakthrough isn't the individual interface, it's the team interface," says John Seely Brown, director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. If Colonel Thorpe's claims come to fruition, the four arms of the U.S. military and hundreds of industrial contractors form an interconnected superorganism.The Defense Simulation Center in Orlando, Florida, is developing a protocol called the Distributed Simulation Internet (DSI), a direct step toward distributed intelligence and distributed presence.This standard allows individual simulation objects (a tank here, a building there) to be combined into a unified simulation on the existing Internet.In fact, as enough parts enter this virtual space and assemble in a magically decentralized cluster, a complete scene emerges.The entire hyper-reality consisting of tens of thousands of war scenes is distributed among many computers on the fiber-optic Internet.A node might provide details about a simulated mountain range, but it doesn't know anything about running rivers or streams, or even whether a stream is babbling through the mountains at all.

Distributed intelligence is the trend of the future.Students on the Internet (which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and is now a global, non-military application) can't wait.They saw the promise of distributed emulation, and had already started working on their own version in the quiet corners of the Internet.