Mutant Marsupials Take Up Arms Against Australian Air Force
The reuse of some object-oriented code has caused tactical headaches for
Australia's armed forces. As virtual reality simulators assume larger roles
in helicopter combat training , programmers have gone to great lengths to
increase the realism of the their scenarios, including detailed landscapes
and -- in the case of the Northern Territory's Operation Phoenix -- herds of
kangaroos (since groups of disturbed animals might well give away a
helicopters position).

The head of the Defense Science and Technology Organization's Land
Operations/Simulations division reportedly instructed developers to model
the local marsupials' movements and reaction to helicopters.

Being efficient programmers, they just re-appropriated some code originally
used to model infantry detachments reactions under the same stimuli, changed
the mapped icon from a soldier to a kangaroo, and increased the figures'
speed of movement.

Eager to demonstrate their flying skills for some visiting American pilots,
the hotshot Aussies "buzzed" the virtual kangaroos in low flight during a
simulation. The kangaroos scattered, as predicted, and the Americans nodded
appreciatively . . . and then did a double-take as the kangaroos reappeared
from behind a hill and launched a barrage of stinger missiles at the hapless
helicopter. (Apparently the programmers had forgotten the remove "that" part
of the infantry coding).

The lesson? Objects are defined with certain attributes, and any new object
defined in terms of the old one inherits all the attributes. The embarrassed
programmers had learned to be careful when reusing object-oriented code, and
the Yanks left with the utmost respect for the Australian wildlife.

Simulator supervisors report that pilots from that point onwards have
strictly avoided kangaroos, just as they were meant to.

Origins:   This bit of humorous computerlore has been circulating since
shortly after it was supposedly unleashed on the world at a "June 15,
1999 Defense Science and Technology Organization Lecture Series
Melbourne, Australia." The gist of the anecdote is true, although much
that is not true has been added or facts have been exaggerated for
humorous effect.

As revealed by Dr. Anne-Marie Grisogono, head of the Simulation Land
Operations Division at the Australian  DSTO (Defence Science and
Technology Organisation) in the publication Defence Systems Daily , she
did not "instruct developers to model the local marsupials' movements
and reaction to helicopters" because "groups of disturbed animals might
well give away a helicopter's position," nor did corner-cutting
programmers seek to save some effort by simply replacing images of
soldiers with images of kangaroos without modifying the underlying
instructions for their behavior. Programmers did add animated kangaroos
to the simulation, and they did accomplish this by replacing the visual
representation of soldiers with visual representations of the hopping
marsupials (while neglecting to remove the weapons and firing behavior
from these representations), but this was all done out of fun (not
necessity), and this humorous glitch was discovered right away and not
unwittingly (and embarrassingly) displayed to a group of visitors
(American or otherwise). Additionally, as Dr. Grisogono related,
"[S]ince we were not at that stage interested in weapons, we had not set
any weapon or projectile types, so what the kangaroos fired at us was in
fact the default object for the simulation, which happened to be large
multicoloured beachballs."

So, it was neither programmers nor pilots who "learned a lesson" from
this one. If anyone, it was Dr. Grisogono, who has now learned
first-hand just how easily an innocuous anecdote can be transformed into
something sensational, and how quickly and widely it can be spread.

Andrew