In just about every submarine movie, there's a scene where the heroes, aboard one sub, engage the villains, in another, in some sort of deep-sea shootout. Neither side knows exactly where the other is, and the savvier captain usually the good guy -- turns that ambiguity to deadly advantage. A new program seeks to apply artificial intelligence to ocean data and thereby help submarine operators understand where their adversaries are, what they're doing, and what they can see. Even today's best sonar technology doesn't give a sub captain a very good sense of the battlespace, says Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at Scripps Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who is embarking on the U.S. Navy program. "What the submariners get is a low-dimensional picture. So if you are towing an array, you get information like bearing and sometimes frequency information," Jaffe said at the Defense One / Nextgov Genius Machines Summit here on Tuesday.