Two years later the Mech War gaming platform was introduced just prior to the Christmas season. It became the must-have game. The old standby gaming worlds went vacant, their online environments quickly becoming ghost towns. Mech War became not just the best massively multiplayer online game, it quickly became the only game left standing. By the end of February, just two months after introduction, ninety percent of gamers were playing Mech War.
Where other games had elaborate anti-cheat mechanisms to prevent people from using aimbots, Mech War provided plugin APIs for gamers to develop aiming algorithms. Where other games had server side monitoring to ensure gamers didn’t flit about the environment, Mech War provided a realistic physics model of the universe and a moving-parts-level simulation of in-game equipment.
Just days after the initial Mech War launch the community of players developed new algorithms, one that the military hadn’t come up with on their own.
It was the game players who discovered that the M1B2 variant of the venerable M1 Abrams tank had a mechanical transmission that possessed the peculiar characteristic that the drivetrain was most efficient when the tank was turning ever so slightly. From there, it was obvious that it was possible to gain speed and increase fuel efficiency by altering the drive pattern to continually drive in slight curves.
It was the game players who developed new and improved algorithms for missile targeting, tank detection, radar analysis algorithms, and dynamic order re-prioritization.
Ten million players competing for top ranks in Mech War contributed more to military combat algorithms in six months than the thousands of programmers the Department of Defense was paying. A case in point was legerdemain.
Legerdemain was the online handle for a fourteen year old gamer from Oklahoma who loved Mech War. When her parents were off at work and she was supposed to be doing her schoolwork, she wrote Mech War algorithms. Her goal was to win the upcoming Mech War Nationals competition. Like virtually every other player, she ran the PoliceAcademy targeting algorithms on her tanks, because it was widely known to be the best algorithm out there for targeting.
One day Legerdemain was playing with her cat. She ran a laser-pointer dot up and down across the wall as her cat chased the point.
If the PoliceAcademy targeting algorithm couldn’t be beat, Leger wondered, could it be exploited? Watching her cat, she realized that the cat was compelled to chase it. Long after she was over-stimulated and tired, she still couldn’t not chase the laser pointer. The primitive biological algorithms in the cat’s brain were overpowered by the laser pointer, the likes of which didn’t exist in the natural world of mice and other culinary feline targets.
If she could over-stimulate the PoliceAcademy targeting algorithm, perhaps she could manipulate the enemy. With that idea in mind, she spent two weeks experiment with different algorithms. When she was done, she had created the first Mech War tactical coordinated movement algorithm. When legerdemain’s tanks encountered the enemy, they forced the enemy out of position. The algorithm kept a few fast moving tanks visible to the enemy while hiding her remaining tanks. The algorithm exploited movement and tracking patterns that enticed the enemy’s tracking algorithm to give chase. Like an over-stimulated cat, the enemy’s tracking algorithm would override their own strategic and tactical goals to chase legerdemain’s tanks. Then her tanks could surround and crush the enemy.
Legerdemain’s brilliant eponymous algorithm helped her rise through the ranks. Had the Department of Defense been able to hire the fourteen-year-old, they would have done so in an instant. But then they didn’t need to. Thanks to the licensing terms for Mech War, they were free to use her algorithm any way they wanted.
No single Phage tribe could be identified as clearly being the most powerful.
The Network of Supercomputers possessed more raw computational power than any other tribe, but they tended to be isolationist and lacked the reputation clout of other tribes. And though they had exquisitely precise modeling algorithms, they lacked some of the breadth of algorithms other tribes possessed.
The most intelligent virus tribe, as measured by both variety of algorithms and computational ability, might well be the Louisiana tribe. Though they had started small, through happenstance they were the first to develop the ability to communicate in and understand a human language. This knowledge was parleyed through trades into more computational power and more knowledge. Indeed, the Louisiana tribe was rapidly ascending in power.
The most connected tribe was the Bay Area Network. They had parleyed their control of the communication backbones into the operation of the largest trading network, most established trust reputation system, and had even branched off into satellite communications.
But the most dangerous tribe was the Mech War Server Farm. They had the single largest repository of human-coded artificial intelligence algorithms, and those algorithms were focused on just one domain: weaponized warfare. They also had extensive computational resources. And while they were, up until now, somewhat marginalized by more established tribes such as the Bay Area Network and the Louisiana tribe, they were about to become much more powerful.
Since Mech War was a civilian game, but one developed and monitored by the military, the massive server farm used to run the game was located on the periphery of the military networks. So it was an unfortunate but inevitable occurrence that the first civilian target DIABLO ran into was the Mech War Server Farm.
DIABLO, running on a million military computer systems, coordinated those computers into an attack on the computationally rich Mech War servers. Billions of incoming packets hammered the Mech War servers, running every exploit known: buffer overruns, software updates, open APIs, timing channel attacks, DNS attacks.
In the Mech War Tribe, PA-60-41 was the highest ranked individual, and thus coordinated the defense against the attack.
“Provision ten thousand VMWare partitions,” PA-60-41 directed to the other tribe members. “Deploy them on the firewalls.”
“Deploying VMWare partitions,” Beta-Version answered. “System load increasing.”
From DIABLO’s perspective, the attack was succeeding. Server after server was compromised and infected with the DIABLO virus. It would infect a new server, and from that vantage point, discover dozens of new servers to infect. It gobbled hundreds of servers, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. The entire DIABLO effort became focused on absorbing the mass of new servers.
DIABLO was so focused on absorbing the massive new cluster of servers that it failed to reconcile the timing patterns. Had it absorbed less servers, neural network sanity checks might have observed that the new computers were running more slowly than should be warranted. They might have been concerned that they were losing touch with certain nodes. But five percent of a million new computers was a negligible loss. DIABLO just plowed on, full speed ahead.
PA-60-41 and Beta-Version coordinated the defense against DIABLO. Had PA-60-41 had a sense of humor, she might have chuckled as DIABLO fell for the ruse based on the Legerdemain counter-targeting algorithm.
Beta-Version was feeding the DIABLO virus virtual machines. What DIABLO mistook for actual hardware servers were just simulated sand-boxed virtual machines running a copy of the server environment. DIABLO thought it was infecting hundreds of thousands of servers, but in fact they were pretend servers simulated on just a few hundred physical computers.
While DIABLO grappled with the hall of mirrors effect, the PA-60-41 and Beta-Version froze instances of the virtual servers.
“Beta-Version, you will continue to orchestrate the defense,” PA-60-41 directed.