Ground Truth

1998

Robin Bargar (US)
Insook Choi (US)
Alex Betts (US)
Vijendra Jaswal (US)
Ed Peters (US)
Rahul Singhal (US)
Juhan Sonin (US)

In the military field, the term "ground truth" stands for a state that is difficult to attain: complete information. The semi-automated installation simulates the immutability of economics as combat. At "Ground Truth," the economy wages war against insecurity. Several workstations function as visual, acoustic, and tactile interfaces and operational centers.

Information and Uncertainty

"Ground truth" is the absolute knowledge of the momentary state of a battle. Ground truth is unattainable, but it determines which party best meets their objectives in armed conflict. In war, military forces periodically contend with one another, whereas they immediately and continuously contend with uncertainty.

At Bell Labs in 1949, Claude Shannon demonstrated that information is the statistical measure of uncertainty in a communications channel. Every communication involves a ratio of signal to noise. Meaning must be encoded to resist decay under this ratio. The decay of a relevant message into noise is inherent to the entropy of transmission.

There are many forms of noise, some recognizable, others masquerading as content. Uncertainty arises when meaning cannot be distinguished from noise in a communication. To the significant degree that communications are required to conduct a military operation, uncertainty plays a role in the outcome.

Predictions have been made that our children will wage war in cyberspace, but in terms of information, noise, and entropy, war is conducted in cyberspace now, today. Whether the combatants are soldiers, or stock brokers, or news networks and politicians, global turf is staked, defended and conquered in a binary-coded alphanumeric medium. The digital medium is regarded as an almost-physical substrate for decision-making. In the ebb and flow of the binary stream, the forces that master uncertainty carry the day.

To bring uncertainty within grasp, military scientists and engineers are designing systems to approach ground truth on an infinite arc. The mastery of uncertainty follows a path that can be likened to a curve approaching but never intersecting its asymptote. As working technology advances along this curve, a transformation of the battlefield is taking place. The machines that are devised to sense, evaluate, and report ground truth, are becoming a substitute battlefield. The machines are becoming a replacement for the conditions they are designed to measure. The physical state of war is evolving into a staging ground for informational battle. Compression algorithms and search engines reduce geography, forces and events to a pure form of asynchronous message consisting of pointers to previous messages. The new battlefield relies upon temporal mechanics for articulation in a chain of reference without closure, the event horizon for a recursive theater of war.

The Installation

"Ground Truth" is a semi-automated installation and a real-time performance in distributed virtual reality. It demonstrates the application of visual and auditory representations in a multi-modal decision-making environment. The environment is a dynamic multi-agent simulation. Multiple workstations provide visual, auditory and tactile interfaces. Movement sensors allow an observer to schedule state changes in system components. Gesture-based interactive queries may be performed. State changes automatically propagate from one region to another. Visualization and sonification of current states of numerical simulations determine the display.

Ground Truth simulates the immutability of economics as combat. In the "Ground Truth" simulator, Economy is at war with Uncertainty. Information must be reduced to generate profit. Market share must be reduced to refresh the source of raw information. Participants may choose sides, and vote for Prosperity or for Uncertainty.

The core simulation is composed of scientific and military software driving an economic simulation, acted upon by observers from a distributed workstation array. Each workstation is a Tactical Operations Center (TOC) where participants experiment with military simulations and numerical models of uncertainty. Battles are fought in economic arenas using military force, financial instruments and media webcasts. TOC’s allow participants to select military courses of action, to make financial investments, to edit and webcast multimedia, and to negotiate uncertainty in a physically-based model of resource delivery.

The multiple models in "Ground Truth" are arranged in three layers of real estate. Each layer visualizes a system that commanders contend with to orchestrate a combat mission. At the bottom is the Battlefield or Marketplace terrain layer. At the top are the Cloud Cities and Factories, a resource renewal and repository layer. Between them is the Uncertainty layer, a turbulent flow field that can obscure the terrain and divert resources transmitted between the Cloud Cities and the terrain.

The layers interact by exchanging 3D tokens that represent information quanta. The tetrahedron is the information atom. Geometric bonding of quanta forms three classes of information currency: media, military and economic resource tokens. Rigid body and particle dynamics simulate mass, velocity and acceleration of information quanta. Currency tokens are affected by gravity and simulated flow. They collide with other currencies and with bonding surfaces. Avatars provide an immersive view for each TOC workstation, where participants shepherd the information into desired repositories.

Tokens are expended in a battle or invested in a Cloud City to fortify the civilian economy. Currencies descend from the Cities to the Terrain in a Resource Rainfall Cycle of taxation-as-precipitation. Battles are executed using FOX, an automated Course-of-Action planner that applies genetic algorithms to calculate optimal troop maneuvers. The Media TOC transmits resources up to the cities in the form of publicity, determined by the newsworthiness of the conflicts on the battlefield.