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hudebnik)
Two things: this is a thing that has happened, I have a read on what it is that nobody else seems to have come up with.
1) The thing that happened:
2026 Jan 16: NYTimes: "
Thousands of Chinese Fishing Boats Quietly Form Vast Sea Barriers" by Chris Buckley, Agnes Chang and Amy Chang Chien
The most interesting thing here is the visualization animations, so if that link doesn't work for you:
2026 Jan 17: TaiwanPlus News [TaiwanPlusNews on YT]: "
NYT: China Tests Civilian Fishing Boats in Maritime Military Operations"
2) Take:
“The sight of that many vessels operating in concert is staggering,” said Mark Douglas, an analyst at Starboard, a company with offices in New Zealand and the United States. Mr. Douglas said that he and his colleagues had “never seen a formation of this size and discipline before.”
“The level of coordination to get that many vessels into a formation like this is significant,” he said.
Yeah, so, about that:
It turns out that the world leader in developing systems for coordinating large numbers of semi-autonomous vehicles is China.
The way a drone show works is that the design of the show and the intended positions and trajectories of all the individual drones is calculated and stored on the coordinating computer, from which they are transmitted to the drones during the show. However, drones in the air can be knocked off course by turbulence, so they also have onboard collision avoidance and position resumption algorithms.
The drone show company in question,
Shenzhen DAMODA Intelligent Control Technology Co., Ltd. brags they can control 10,000 drones from a single laptop.
There were only 2,000 ships. Well within what their system could handle.
So what this could be is a test of such a coordination technology deployed to civilian boats.
Perhaps on each of those ships was either a sail-by-wire system that puts them under remote/autonomous control, or a receiver/interface that relayed instructions to the human pilots from a drone-controller that both received orders from command-and-control and managed the specifics of positioning through the same sort of collision-avoidance and repositioning algorithm as light-show drones.
Also, I
suspect the way DAMODA manages to control so many devices from a single laptop – I was not able to quickly get a bead on this, and it would be unsurprising if they were less than forthcoming about their secret sauce – is that they have been figuring out ways to offload more and more of the steering logic onto the drones themselves. There comes a point, I suppose, where the logic for collision avoidance and repositioning crosses over into what used to be called (back in the 1980s and 1990s) flocking algorithms. Perhaps this was a test of a flocking algorithm based system for boats.
In any event, this might not be an example of a lot of people doing a thing. This might be an example of a thing being done to a lot of people. I mean, it almost certainly is the latter in that the government of China's modus operandi is to "voluntell" its citizens, and one of the concerning things here is the apparent use of civilians for military maneuvers. I'm saying this might be a test of a system that doesn't rely on acquiescence to government authority.
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