Marines Are So Stupid, Or Are They

I love this story, because everyone always thinks Marines are stupid, and as a Marine, I can tell you that there are a ton of smart Jarheads out there (yes, there are some dumbasses too), but I have had the pleasure of working with some brilliant Marines.

n this particular case, DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.) was using the Marines to help train their AI robot.

The concept was to see if the Marines could defeat the robot by sneaking up to it and touching it, without being detected by the robot. The robot was learning different ways that the Marines used to approach it and then it would use that information to detect the Marines.

The Marines however were thinking outside of the box, well inside the box too, pun intended, when two of the Marines did somersaults for 300 meters, two more hid under a cardboard box and another two took branches from a fir tree and walked the 300 meters pretending to be a tree. In the end, none of the eight Marines were detected. The problem was that the AI was trained to detect humans walking, not the other tricks that these Marines used.

I guess Marines aren’t as stupid as you thought.