March 27, 2007: Do They Know They've Designed A Game?

Engineers at MIT have created SpaceNet, a program that models the allocation and transfer of resources between "nodes" in an interplanetary research/exploration/development scenario.

For instance, if you have to keep five astronauts alive at Tranquility Base and two more are arriving next month, you'd better have put extra food in the pipeline quite a while ago. To say nothing of oxygen. But some resources will in time be produced at nodes off Earth, and distributed among other nodes.

Sounds very useful, but even more . . . it sounds like there's a game in it.

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