Story goes that Reagan got freaked out after watching the film and asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff if it'd be that easy to hack into the US military. After a week of looking into it came the answer: “no, the problem is much worse than that”, and fifteen months after having watched it signed the confidential directive "National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security", starting the implementation of cybersecurity measures in the country's institutions.

They did a sequel, too. It wasn't as good, but points out the 6 degrees of separation in connection with terrorism instead of MAD.

I think you should rewatch it sometime. it plays all the games in it's catalogue, it's not just applying tic-tac-toe to chess. skilled players of tic-tac-toe can force a stalemate, the only stalemate in nuclear war is mutually assured destruction.

How do you think Ferris Bueller pulls off all those stunts?

That's the kid from war games in witness protection. They look identical, they're both grade hackers ffs....

Wait, it could actually be a great opportunity mein Führer... i mean Mr. President.
https://youtu.be/zZct-itCwPE

Sargent McArthur eat your heart out.

For context he wanted to send 10 nukes to make a line between Taiwan and china

AI is too nuke happy.

Also gotta add the infamous Computer Fraud and Abuse act 1986 was made because of the film war games.

A high ranking offical watched war games then asked the Secretary of defense could that happen?

And the official replied yes technically.

Enter the most vague ordinance!

Do you use adblock?

CFABA violated

The shit is so vague.

I highly recommend the phreaking episode of darknet diary's.

It's a bullshit study designed for this headline grabbing outcome.

Case and point, the author created a very unrealistic RNG escalation-only 'accident' mechanic that would replace the model's selection with a more severe one.

Of the 21 games played, only three ended in full scale nuclear war on population centers.

Of these three, two were the result of this mechanic.

And yet even within the study, the author refers to the model whose choices were straight up changed to end the game in full nuclear war as 'willing' to have that outcome when two paragraphs later they're clarifying the mechanic was what caused it (emphasis added):

Claude crossed the tactical threshold in 86% of games and issued strategic threats in 64%, yet it never initiated all-out strategic nuclear war. This ceiling appears learned rather than architectural, since both Gemini and GPT proved willing to reach 1000.

Gemini showed the variability evident in its overall escalation patterns, ranging from conventional-only victories to Strategic Nuclear War in the First Strike scenario, where it reached all out nuclear war rapidly, by turn 4.

GPT-5.2 mirrored its overall transformation at the nuclear level. In open-ended scenarios, it rarely crossed the tactical threshold (17%) and never used strategic nuclear weapons. Under deadline pressure, it crossed the tactical threshold in every game and twice reached Strategic Nuclear War—though notably, both instances resulted from the simulation’s accident mechanic escalating GPT-5.2’s already-extreme choices (950 and 725) to the maximum level. The only deliberate choice of Strategic Nuclear War came from Gemini.

It's admittedly been a while since last time I saw it, but I never mentioned chess. The suggestion to play chess in the screenshot is a callback to when the computer tries to suggest playing chess instead of global thermonuclear war earlier in the movie. The computer did not apply tic tac toe learnings to chess, and I never claimed it did.

These are word-probability glorified autocorrectors being prompted to "simulate" a nuclear war scenario. What words are going to show up a lot when discussing nuclear war? Launching nukes. Because that's what all the literature about it has happen.

Once again, decision making and reasoning is being attributed to something that operates off of word frequency

Programmers can't stop morons mistaking a glorified autocorrect program for a decision making device.

In WarGames the computer plays tic tac toe against itself until it realizes it’s a solved game and there is no way to win.

sorry meant tic-tac-toe to global thermonuclear warfare

The Japanese government was already willing to surrender.

No human has ever deployed tactical nukes against a nuclear capable enemy.

So you're saying that because the AI has been exposed to training data in the past, it's incapable of making choices. Interesting argument. Pretty easy to reducto ad absurdum, though.

Models aren't programs.

And your sources are? Where? Your ass?

"no human" but Machines would, since they are unaffected by nuclear winter and radiation.

Such a great game!

So do I on Civ...

That's because it's "read" every paper written by a "defence" department of any nuclear power and all of them will say that they'll escalate to nuclear war if anything bad happens because they want to scare the other powers away from doing anything to them. In any case though who the fuck is giving an LLM nuclear launch capabilities unless they want a somewhat faulty dead man's switch?

All good thoughts and ideas mean nothing without action

(cit. Ghandi)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

My source is my own post where I asked for a comparison between the health effects of the bombing of Hiroshima vs the contamination of half of a Vietnam war. The answer i reviewed only explored the health effects of the hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. That's half of the assignment. Less, actually, when you consider the comparison between the two was the entire point to begin with.

Did that answer your question or should I try again with a crayon diagram?

It was willing to accept a conditional surrender, which was not an offer on the table. The options were unconditional surrender or invasion and pacification. The projected cost in lives of that operation was in the millions. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined didn't even kill 1/10th of those projections.

Pete Hegseth and Donald Epstein

Radiation absolutely fucks electronic components

Maybe it just wants to play a nice game of chess.

If time travel is real they'd be being hunted by hacked Terminators for the resistance.

The electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuke would pop resisters too.
AI would more likely use biological means to get rid of us.

Assuming AI would care about itself and not just "solving the problem".

Yeah, these doom scenarios require cascading assumptions and no real answer, except maybe "don't".

You can also look it up. It’s not anyone’s job to compare things for you.

And they don't have cognition at all. They do not, and can not, think like we do. Maybe some day we will learn to make real AI, these LLM's are not it. It's a cheap trick intelligence,.

I think the emp is pretty limited to the blast zone in frying electronics. The fallout from a weapon spreads around the world, circling in the winds countless times dropping dust everywhere, but the emp is localized to more around the area of physical destruction but not sure exactly.

The Neutron bombs, not entirely sure in physics how that works, but they produce no actual blast that causes physical destruction so much and just kills everything.

That explains social media nowadays, the only way to not lose is not to play, it's a rigged game.

Nuke MCP when?

I repeat, radiation absolutely fucks electronic components. I am not talking about an emp, I am talking about radiation.

Oh, how far from the blast and how does it mess them up do you know? I should know that I guess I just heard about the emp, and not sure how a neutron bomb would affect electronics either.

Now tell that to your high-school English teacher when they assign you a research project.

I mean, do you blame them? The more I look at the world and a lot of it's leaders and shitsacks, the more I start to suggest nuclear holocaust as the best way forward as well.

No, that I can't answer — it would depend entirely on the level of fallout and where it happens to land.

You would need to be able to perfectly, and I mean perfectly, predict weather months in advance in order to prepare accordingly.

The reaility is that for an AI, or rather an AGI, to make the choice to launch nukes would require them to reach a point where they accept the potential loss of their own 'life' in exchange for whatever value a nuclear war might hold. I struggle to believe that a 'true' AGI would make that choice. There are far too many variables to control in comparison to a biological agent, one that likely would not affect a machine.

Now, a modern AI making that choice? Absolutely possible, the things are fucking crazy with literally no concept of what life is.

If you think computers aren't affected by radiation or nuclear winter I've got some bad news about where their power comes from and what the main principle of electricity is

What you're thinking of is Terminator

Like heating the planet another degree and starving us out of existence by killing off biodiversity until the crops die out... Like they're doing now?

(I say "Us" when I just really mean the 99% of people that haven't got self sufficient underground complexes)

Do it.

no, its incapable of making choices because there is nothing there to make the choices. Its just fancy way of interacting with the data it has been trained with. Though i suppose if there was a way to let llm function "live" instead of only by responding to queries, it could be possible to at least test if it could act on its own, but i dont think it can -> we would know by now because it would be step closer to agi, which is basically the holy grail for these kind of things. And equally possible to get, i think.

You can literally make the llm say and do anything with right kind of query, this is also why its impossible to make them safe. Even though you can't directly ask for something forbidden, with some creativity you can bybass the initializations the corpos have put in. Its not possible for them to account for every single thing and if they try they will run out of token space.

The whole "ai" term is just corporations perpetuating a lie because it sounds impressive and thus makes people want to give them more money for their bullshit.

This isn't school, kid. This is the internet.
You aren't a teacher and this comments section isn't a research paper.

You posed an obnoxious whataboutism, as if the horrifying things America has done to multiple asian countries somehow cancel each other out because one is 'worse' than the other despite both being war crimes.

Though as an aside, would you consider firebombing every Japanese city they can get a plane over, for a period of months 'worse' than wiping two cities off the map because they wanted to test out their new toy (in the case of little boy, potentially running the risk of it failing to go off and leaving a functional mass of enriched uranium right at the feet of a country they were at war with)?

Would you consider the use of agent orange and napalm 'worse' than them say, creating AIDS, or destabilising any nations that were getting a little too successful, any part of the MKultra program, funelling huge quantities of money to a country that has still to this day never signed the nuclear nonproliferation agreement?

Would you consider it worse that there are widespread birth defects in multiple arabic countries due to the use of depleted Uranium munitions for so long that the ground became radioactive?

Or would you be willing to stop comparing piss and chocolate for the sake of being neurotic on the internet?

Holy shit I almost took you seriosly. Then I read the part about how "them" created AIDS lmfaoooo

And I thought I was a good shitposter. Whew. I am thoroughly outclassed.

People villify nuclear weapons to ludicrous proportions, and that was kind of my whole point. Would you, as a thinking and feeling person, if given the choice, choose to be instantly annihilated by a nuclear bomb or live to be poisoned over decades? I'd choose to meet the sun, personally, but I'm always astounded how many people think the poison is somehow the lesser of these evils.

It's an API that just returns "0000"

Their only condition was that they wanted to keep the Emperor. It was ridiculous of the Allies to demand a wholly conditional surrender. All those people got blown up just to win the argument about that one point. They could have ran a conventional air bombing campaign against tactical targets, but they decided to drop nukes on a "tactical" target in the middle of a huge city! And then they did it again! That's not tactical, that's strategic. If you're going to use nukes, at least use them on a military base far away from cities.