OU participates in interdisciplinary research project on AI tools for decision-making in wargames

Dr Paul Piwek, Senior Lecturer in Computing, has been awarded £97,000 in funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of a large multi-site project titled Wargaming AI – Through the Enemy’s Eyes. 

The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, defence and security experts, psychologists and computational linguists from The Open University and the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Lincoln, Sheffield, Salford and Ulster. The project is funded through the EPSRC’s “AI Decision Support for National Security and Defence” initiative.

The research seeks to revolutionise how military decision-makers are trained to anticipate and respond to opponents’ actions in simulated conflict. Traditional wargaming focuses on first-order thinking — understanding the immediate situation. The current project moves beyond this, developing AI tools that will provide support for “second order thinking” — understanding how an opponent perceives your own actions and how those beliefs evolve in real time.

This innovative approach could provide the UK’s defence community with a powerful new tool for achieving “Decision Advantage”, a key strategic goal outlined by the Ministry of Defence. The findings are expected to have direct applications in the ongoing modernisation of defence training environments, including the digitisation of the RAF Academy and the transformation of the Royal Naval Academy’s educational systems.

Dr Piwek said, “This project is an exciting opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary team on research into advanced AI support for decision-making. Initial work will focus on themes most clearly related to the military, helping defence professionals deal with the complexities of modern conflict, but it is our intent to develop our research and methodologies in such a way that they can be amended to suit a variety of contexts; ideally our tools will be usable in any kind of scenario where different parties are engaged in a competitive scenario that involves trying to understand what another actor thinks of us.”