A Group Of U.S. Marines Defeated An AI System Using A Sneaky Trick From ‘Metal Gear’

AI has gotten smarter and smarter.

Thanks to better training data, better algorithms, and increasingly powerful sensors, AI-powered robots have made giants leaps, and have become machines capable of doing sophisticated tasks.

But just like any other AIs in the past, end results depend on the training materials, and how well the AI can use its knowledge to do what it's supposed to do.

A book titled Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, written by former Army Ranger and Pentagon policy analyst Paul Scharre, discusses things like the "struggle to control artificial intelligence" with particular focus on U.S., China, Europe

But among other things, as tweeted by Shashank Joshi, a group of U.S. Marines managed to evade detection by an AI robot using a cardboard box.

This sneaky trick was first introduced in a popular video game decades ago.

In one of the cases, DARPA is said to have spent a week with a group of Marines at a test site to train an AI robot by attempting to defeat it.

In the test, the robot was positioned right "in the middle of a traffic circle," and the Marines had to find a way to approach it undetected.

"If any Marines could get all the way in and touch this robot without being detected, they would win," Scharre explained.

Scharre continued to explain how two of the Marines "somersaulted for 300 meters," and another "stripped a fir tree and walked like a fir tree."

One way after another, some of these methods worked, and managed to fool the AI-powered robot.

Then, two of the Marines also came up with the idea to hide under a cardboard box.

After a lot of giggling, those two Marines also managed to pass.

The reason for all this, is because the AI inside the robot had only been trained to detect a moving human who walks, not a human doing somersaults or moving while disguised like a tree, or hiding under cardboard box.

This test shows that, even through AI-powered robots have become complex machineries capable of accomplishing certain feats and missions perfectly, sometimes, AIs are still terrible at other things.

Metal Gear is a long-running video game franchise created by Hideo Kojima and published by Konami.

The franchise that focuses on techno-thriller stealth genre, was originally released in 1987 for MSX home computers. The player often takes control of a special forces operative (usually Solid Snake or Big Boss), who is assigned the task of finding the titular superweapon, "Metal Gear", a bipedal walking tank with the ability to launch nuclear weapons.

And in the game franchise, a cardboard box, is an industrially prefabricated box, primarily used for packaging goods and materials. It usually consisted of a thin pasteboard with a corrugated paper center, and is largely composed of recycled paper.

The cardboard box was first found in the first Metal Gear game, and since then, it can be found in all Metal Gear games after that.

In fact, the item is one of the trademark items of the Metal Gear series.

Players can equip a cardboard box to hide the main character under it, in order avoid alarming enemy sentries or surveillance cameras.

Enemies won't be alarmed if players hide and stay still under a cardboard box, even when they are in the enemies' line of sight.

Players will only raise suspicion if they wear a cardboard box in the wrong place. Running around while wearing a box will raise a guard's suspicions. The same applies if the soldiers bumped into the box, or saw the box in the middle of their patrol route.