The U.S. Navy has a pretty cool history of tapping the hive mind to solve problems, beginning with the loss of the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine, in June 1968. The Scorpion set out for Norfolk, Virginia from a base in Spain but never showed up and an extensive search was launched but yielded nothing. It’s now thought that the Soviets sunk her.

Dr. John Craven, a director for the Navy’s Special Projects Division landed the task of finding the Scorpion, it being one of only two the Navy’s ever lost. Craven turned to his navy men for help, giving experienced sailors choices for different possible scenarios and asking them to offer an educated guess of where they thought the sub might be. Craven fed the guesses into a statistical search model called Bayesian search theory, which had been developed a couple years earlier for use in locating lost and scuttled nuclear bombs. (This doesn’t always work, by the way, as there is still a lost, undetonated 60-year-old nuclear bomb located somewhere just off the coast of Savannah, Georgia.)

This bit of crowd sourcing gave Craven a single coordinate for an answer, a collective best guess, that led the Navy to within a couple hundred meters of where the wreckage of the submarine lay. No one involved had correctly guessed the Scorpion’s location, yet the collective had proven wise.

The Navy’s Office of Naval research is taking another stab at tapping the collective for solutions with a massive multiplayer online wargame leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) it’s launching May 16. This time, the problem is the loss of life and interruption of commerce posed lately by Somali pirates. The ONR has asked around 1,000 expert minds from a variety of fields to pose ideas using a platform that follows the mold of Twitter for ways the Navy can shut down the thriving pirate around Africa and the Middle East.

According to a Wired write-up of the MMOWGLI project (via Popular Science),  players are asked given scenarios and asked to innovate (in 140 characters or less) a solution for the problem posed and then to defend it, suggesting ways its implementation could create more problems. The ideas are passed around among players, who can pick the best ones, expand, alter and challenge them. The ideas that get the most play win, effectively employing democracy to fight piracy.

That’s pretty much the extent of the game; there’s no first-person shooter aspect (America’s Army, designed for recruitment by the U.S. Army, provides that) although the public is invited to join in as players. Ostensibly, the Navy will implement the soundest ideas the hive mind produces, thwarting Somali pirates and rescuing the world using collective consciousness. You can sign up here.