Description

Crystal Ball is a planning tool that helps its user avoid surprises. Given a set of plans, Crystal Balls uses fluent graphs to project possible futures, evaluate them, and alert the user before unexpected critical points occur. Continuous fluents graphs enable Crystal Ball to operate efficiently over a large space of possible futures. Crystal Ball will be a component of the Deep Green system, which aims to improve military planning by connecting the commander to Crystal Ball and other technologies via human-friendly interfaces such as sketching.

Arena War

Arena War is an abstract free-for-all battle simulator. We used Arena War as a test-bed to develop the technologies used by Crystal Ball. Its advantage is that it is simple, with interactions between units being easily modeled and understood, yet capable of producing complex overall outcomes. In particular, we investigated continuous fluent graphs for efficiently generating, evaluating, and monitoring possible futures in Arena War.

Personnel

• Prof. Paul R. Cohen
• Yu-Han Chang
• Wesley Kerr

Funding

This work is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under a contract managed by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).