RENO (AP) “” As a teenager, Ryan Leigh loved video games.
He still does, but some things have changed. Leigh has grown up. His games are serious.
Leigh is a graduate student in computer science at the University of Nevada, Reno, developing software programs for the Navy that simulate everything from terrorist attacks in the Persian Gulf to erratic sail boats on San Diego Bay.
“I play games and I work on them,” Leigh said. “The circle is complete.”
Leigh belongs to a team of six UNR students led by three professors that’s using sophisticated technology to improve training at the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, R.I.
It’s where officers serving aboard aircraft carriers, destroyers and other vessels learn to react in a variety of situations, from overseas combat to maneuvering around dozens of weekend pleasure craft in a crowded home port.
“In San Diego harbor, we’re mostly concerned with drunk boaters,” said Lt. Ryan Aleson, the computer simulations officer at the warfare school. “We have to operate in high density areas. That’s our mission.”
So, Leigh and the rest of the UNR computer team create a three-dimensional San Diego, with hundreds of boats and ships moving in different directions ?s experienced Navy captains at the helms of some, but Saturday afternoon skippers sailing the rest.
“My interest is computer games,” said Chris Miles, another of the computer science grad students. “That’s what this is, games.”
With a purpose.
“Drive a ship in a harbor with hundreds of boats without hitting anything,” said Miles, explaining the San Diego scenario. “It’s the most interesting work. These are incredible challenges.”
In other parts of the world, challenges might include suicide attackers in small boats. Anything can happen in the computer simulations. That’s the whole idea.
“We don’t want them to follow a pre-planned script,” said Aleson, who was at UNR recently to evaluate progress on the software development that started in 2003. “We’re getting to the point where we’re getting realistic behaviors.”
The Navy asked for UNR’s help because simulations were limited to what two or three instructors could control on the video screens, usually no more than 20 ships at a time. Programs created by the UNR students and teachers will allow a computer to control hundreds of vessels for a single simulation.
“The problem they have is realism,” said Sushil Louis, director of the Evolutionary Computing Systems Laboratory at UNR. “We’re giving them the ability to make it more realistic.”
So far, the Navy has spent about $2 million on the computer war games project, which UNR professors and Navy officials estimate is about two years from completion.
“We’ve already integrated it with our (training) simulator,” Aleson said of the high-tech classroom in Newport. “It’s working.”
The classroom is a mock-up of a ship’s bridge, where the captain gives orders to the crew. Software simulations, in which ships appear as computer-generated objects in video games, are shown on large screens that officers view from the bridge, as they would at sea.
Leigh has been on the bridge. To him, it seemed real.
“After a while, I actually started feeling seasick,” Leigh said.
From the bridge, naval officers play serious war games.
“We look at terrorist threats,” Aleson said. “We look at large-scale coordinated attacks.”
They also look at crowded San Diego Bay, where one of those Saturday skippers might suddenly veer into the path of a destroyer.
“We are teaching (officers) a decision-making process,” Aleson said.
Every Navy officer assigned to a ship attends the school, which has 1,000 students a year in classes lasting up to six months. Many already have been at sea. That’s why the simulations created at UNR must be realistic.
“A lot of our students have years of experience, they know how to drive ships,” Aleson said of the officers. “If you want to create real-life behaviors, there is a lot more processing a computer has to do.”
The computer-driven ships must perform as if they had human captains.
“Move and navigate just like there’s a real person behind the wheel,” said Monica Nicolescu, a professor of computer science who specializes in robotics. “Make it realistic.”