RUNNING HEAD: Artificial Intelligence to Improve US Military Tactics 1

Development of Artificial Intelligence to Improve US Military Tactics

Faris Syed & Joshua De Vera

Progress Report III

12/10/19

Objectives:

During the past two weeks we’ve started our written proposal as well as finalized ideas about the

final program design and testing. Likewise, we’ve continued to develop the program by finishing

the Excel file reader and decided to use Google Geocoding to determine map data instead of a

2D grid.
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Materials and Methods

In the past couple of weeks we were able to create a file reader from python which reads

through the rows of an Excel spreadsheet and locates the name of an inputted country. Once the

program finds that information, it creates an instance of that country class with all the data from

the spreadsheet which will be used in the game.

Figure 1.​ The following program is the Excel file reader portion of the main file which will find

the country data and prepare the specified country class for the simulation.

Initially we had the program create instances for all the countries in the list and the user

would get to pick which country to use, but we realized it would take up a lot of memory once

we started to create simulations with multiple countries or add more countries to the Excel file.

Recently, we decided to have the user pick the name of the countries first before creating all the
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classes so we only grab the data and create the counties we need so we can cut down on memory

usage.

We also decided to edit how we could tackle geography as a factor in our simulation as

we moved away from a 2D grid which would require a lot of data within our file to track which

countries would be inside that 2D array. Instead, we decided to use the Google Geocode API for

Python which connects the program to a premade Google database which contains all the

necessary data we need for a certain longitude and latitude coordinates: the country the conflict

is in and which country has the geographical highground.

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Figure 2.​ The following image is one of the online samples for Geocoding in Python. We will

reverse the process by finding the location based on longitude and latitude and implement this

program into our own such that we can determine what country we’re in and who has a

geographical advantage.
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Data and Analysis

During the past two weeks we did not collect any data since we concentrated on creating

operating systems and object classes for our simulation. However, we plan to collect data within

the next couple of weeks to determine which military maneuvers have proven to have a strategic

advantage over others.

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Future Plans

Within the next two weeks we’d like to finish the geocoding aspect of the program and

start to implement a gaming system where the artificial intelligence program or an individual can

make war moves within the simulation. Furthermore, we would like to collect data on the

effectiveness of certain military maneuvers against other maneuvers and try to create a system to

quantify who has a military advantage.

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References

Warya, A. (2018). Reading an excel file using Python. Retrieved December 3, 2019, from

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/reading-excel-file-using-python/​.

Google. (2019). Geocoding API. Retrieved December 5, 2019, from

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/start​.

Pandas. (2018). Categorical data. Retrieved December 5, 2019, from

https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/user_guide/categorical.html​.