By Duncan Graham-Rowe

HAL, the infamous killer supercomputer from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, might not have gone mad had it been fitted with a new “conflict resolution” system developed for the American military.

The system, developed at the University of Southern California with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, exploits the benefits of methodical argument to help bickering computer programs resolve their differences and come up with a satisfactory result....