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A bit of humorous computerlore began circulating 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 was true, although much that was not true was also added or 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.
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