Lately I’ve been watching The Deadliest Warrior on spike.com. The show is kind of interesting and reminds me about another show I used to watch: Battle of the Beasts.
Basic idea is to answer a question like: between a pirate and a ninja who would win a fight? Now, the creators of the show cannot simply say: this is better. They need to add a scientific aura to the whole thing or the people who watch it won’t believe it. So they bring in ‘experts’ to asses the damage of the weapons that the warriors would traditionally carry and perform all sorts of tests. Some pseudo-medic assess the damage and declares if it would be a fatal blow or not (dude, I can do that, and have not spend 20 years as an ER doctor :)) and some computer geek wannabe measures all the ‘parameters’ of the weapon. These are fed to a ‘sophisticated computer program that can accurately simulate the battle’. Now I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but I know that this is bull-crap.
1) The uber-program looks more like Excel than a simulation software.
2) There are certainly way more other aspects that need to be taken into account, if such software exists, if you want to be able to only model the warriors. And I’m not even going near the AI subject, which, I doubt that they even mention or have taken into account.
That being said, it’s fun to watch it so see how much ‘damage’ a ballistics gel torso can sustain from the primitive weapons they are testing.
Last but not least, I have a question for the show creators: In the “Green Beret vs. Spetsnaz” episode, what were you thinking when you’ve chosen the winner? (everybody knows about the Green Berets; the Spetsnaz are top secret Russian commandos). So these dummies actually picked the Russians as the winners. Are you f… dumb? Don’t you know who the good guys are?