Astonishing Antipodean Antics

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Killer Kangaroos

Documented: We have now disarmed the kangaroos and it is again safe to fly in Australia.

Yet another case of a story with a germ of truth getting embroidered with a supporting cast, a moral and a punchline or two - thus does an amusing anecdote of a minor programme glitch in early development phase become a morality tale of an embarassing revelation of laziness exposed in demonstration phase.

STANDARD VECTOR:

Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 06:48:38 -0400 (EDT)

Subject: humor: Programming through aquisition

This is supposedly a true story from a recent Defence Science Lectures Series, as related by the head of the Australian DSTO's Land Operations/Simulation division.

They've been working on some really nifty virtual reality simulators, the case in point being to incorporate Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters into exercises (from the data fusion point of view). Most of the people they employ on this sort of thing are ex- (or future) computer game programmers.

Anyway, as part of the reality parameters, they include things like trees and animals. For the Australian simulation they included kangaroos. In particular, they had to model kangaroo movements and reactions to helicopters (since hordes of disturbed kangaroos might well give away a helicopter's position).

Being good programmers, they just stole some code (which was originally used to model infantry detachments reactions under the same stimuli), and changed the mapped icon, the speed parameters, etc. The first time they've gone to demonstrate this to some visiting Americans, the hotshot pilots have decided to get "down and dirty" with the virtual kangaroos. So, they buzz them, and watch them scatter. The visiting Americans nod appreciatively... then gape as the kangaroos duck around a hill, and launch about two dozen Stinger missiles at the hapless helicopter.

Programmers look rather embarrassed at forgetting to remove *that* part of the infantry coding... and Americans leave muttering comments about not wanting to mess with the Aussie wildlife...

As an addendum, simulator pilots from that point onwards avoided kangaroos like the plague, just like they were meant to do in the first place...

DOCUMENTATION:

The Defence Systems Daily e-zine in November 1999 - "Dr Anne-Marie Grisogono, Head, Simulation Land Operations Division at the Australian DSTO has told us what actually happened and we are delighted to set the record straight."

She related the original story of killer kangaroos at a lecture at the Australian Science Festival in May 1999. A helicopter simulator program was indeed put together which included kangaroo movements "for a bit of fun".

The movements of the 'roos were indeed modelled on the movements of soldiers in "retreat". When *first trialling it in the lab* the programmers realised that not only had they forgotten to remove the weapons and "fire" behaviour, but that the program had defaulted due to lack of projectile type input - the default object setting being brightly coloured beachballs.

There were however no visiting dignitaries - just the lab boffins who all enjoyed the joke with no embarassment whatsoever, and Dr Grisogno related the story at the May conference as an innocuous tale of minor humorous glitches in the software development process.

Someone at the conference who wasn't listening carefully or who just enjoyed embroidery produced the email-lore above, which was circulating widely by June 1999 as a lesson in "programming through acquisition", and which was further embroidered and got a nifty new title "Mutant Marsupials Take Up Arms Against Australian Air Force" later in the year.

Dr Grisogono finishes: "I usually conclude the story by reassuring the audience that we have now disarmed the kangaroos and it is again safe to fly in Australia."

References:

• The thalia.org humor archives
• What those Killer Kangaroos really fired, 29 November 1999
• Careless Code Reuse Causes Killer Kangaroos