Hace veinte a\u00f1os, el b\u00e9isbol profesional experiment\u00f3 un auge cuando los cazatalentos tradicionales, basados en d\u00e9cadas de experiencia personal, se unieron a los cient\u00edficos de datos, que aportaban nuevos enfoques y tecnolog\u00eda a la evaluaci\u00f3n de los jugadores. Se desat\u00f3 un intenso debate sobre qu\u00e9 enfoque prevalecer\u00e1: \u00bfla experiencia humana o los n\u00fameros y las estad\u00edsticas? Ahora sabemos que ninguno de los dos triunfar\u00eda; los mejores equipos de b\u00e9isbol de las Grandes Ligas se basan en una combinaci\u00f3n de experiencia humana y estad\u00edsticas avanzadas para ofrecer la evaluaci\u00f3n m\u00e1s completa del talento.\u00a0Avanzamos hasta hoy y se ha formado una tensi\u00f3n similar en el campo de los juegos de guerra de defensa , donde los jugadores de guerra tradicionales, confiando en a\u00f1os de experiencia y dise\u00f1os de juegos a medida, est\u00e1n tratando de entender los r\u00e1pidos avances en modelado, simulaci\u00f3n e inteligencia artificial.<\/p>\n
Twenty years ago, an explosion occurred in professional baseball as traditional baseball scouts \u2014 relying on decades of personal experience \u2014 collided with data scientists bringing new approaches and technology into the evaluation of baseball players. There were raucous debates on which approach would reign supreme: human expertise or numbers and statistics? We now know that neither approach would win out; the best baseball teams across the major leagues rely on a mix of human expertise and advanced statistics to provide the most complete assessment of talent.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to today and a similar tension has formed in the field of\u00a0defense wargaming<\/a>, where traditional wargamers \u2014 relying on years of expertise and bespoke game designs \u2014 are coming to grips with rapid advances in modeling and simulation and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n At the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, we have been living and breathing that tension as we have worked to incorporate generative AI and modeling and simulation into defense wargaming. The results of that work? We don\u2019t think we need a 20-year debate. Just like in baseball, the future of wargaming lies in a marriage of modeling and simulation, human expertise and AI.<\/p>\n To understand why wargaming is having its\u00a0\u201cMoneyball\u201d moment<\/a>, you have to first unpack what makes traditional wargaming so valuable. Wargaming is fundamentally about human decision-making, but\u00a0its magic is in the experiential learning opportunities the games provide<\/a>. War is never simple. There is no \u201call-seeing eye\u201d that provides perfect information. Hence, wargaming explores how humans make decisions in imperfect scenarios, and how other humans respond to those decisions.<\/p>\n Armies of psychologists have spent entire careers attempting to understand human decision-making. It\u2019s not easy to boil down to numbers and equations. Moreover, it\u2019s conveyed through conversation, discussion and debate, something that technology has yet to harness or replicate.<\/p>\n Wargames have served as an indispensable tool in this exploration. They provide a way to exercise the decision-making process, explore why choices were made and determine what the implications might be. However, being human-centric isn\u2019t always efficient. Wargames often require months of planning by experienced wargamers who deeply understand the defense issues at play. They also require human players with the expertise to emulate the various parties in a conflict. All this means wargames are often hosted on an annual cycle and can only explore a small number of the potential scenarios a national security leader might encounter.<\/p>\n After all, how many people could plausibly play the role of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?<\/p>\n But with the advent of generative AI, we now have the ability to ask a computer to harness human language and, at a minimum, plausibly approximate human conversation and decision-making. That opens an opportunity to merge technology and wargaming in a way that hasn\u2019t previously been possible \u2014 meaning we can bring wargaming to a wider audience over a broader set of possible scenarios.<\/p>\n