AI Downs 'Top Gun' Pilot In Dogfights (dailymail.co.uk)

schwit1 writes from a report via Daily Mail: [Daily Mail reports:] "The Artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate was recently assessed by retired USAF Colonel Gene Lee -- who holds extensive aerial combat experience as an instructor and Air Battle Manager with considerable fighter aircraft expertise. He took on the software in a simulator. Lee was not able to score a kill after repeated attempts. He was shot out of the air every time during protracted engagements, and according to Lee, is 'the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date.'" And why is the US still throwing money at the F35, unless it can be flown without pilots. The AI, dubbed ALPHA, features a genetic fuzzy tree decision-making system, which is a subtype of fuzzy logic algorithms. The system breaks larger tasks into smaller tasks, which include high-level tactics, firing, evasion, and defensiveness. It can calculate the best maneuvers in various, changing environments over 250 times faster than its human opponent can blink. Lee says, "I was surprised at how aware and reactive it was. It seemed to be aware of my intentions and reacting instantly to my changes in flight and my missile deployment. It knew how to defeat the shot I was taking. It moved instantly between defensive and offensive actions as needed."

Comments

Unsurprising

[fredgiblet]

It was only a matter of time, computers are able to keep complete situational awareness while analyzing what the target is doing. The only question is how long until we can trust them to work totally autonomously. THAT probably won't come for a while.

Re: Unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical 'futurist' article complete with over the top superlatives and everything. Predicting the demise of humans in yet another field where nobody actually wants that. Countermeasures to things will always exist and the fun part about countermeasures to 'artificial intelligence' is that when you have one the entirety of the enemy's systems are cooked. Look at what happened when our last one trick pony the F-117 has it's stealth penetrated. The entire platform became useless.

Maybe, and here's a concept, we can outfit piloted planes with systems to blow this lab environment victor out of the real skies. Or any of many things that can totally screw over what is ultimately going to be a predictable response mechanism since 'artificial intelligence' doesn't really exist.

So it will be that the dreams of getting rid of humans will die a cold death in the various parents' basements where these futurists live.

Re:Unsurprising

[kaur]

That's easier in the sky than on the ground: Is that a person about to cross the road or a picture of a person on a billboard?

With autonomous cars dominating the road:
Billboards and other sources of ambiguous sensory input will be banned from roads.
Cars will have no windows. Why, if you could watch Netflix instead? Roadside nature does not count your clicks or impressions.
Future roadside will be very different from the current one, dotted with radio beacons or other non-visual navigational aids, but offering nothing for a human to see.

Re: Unsurprising

[arth1]

Humans doing less dangerous and menial jobs is a good thing, not a bad thing.

That's dogmatic, and not necessarily true.

I would think that humans doing dangerous things for which there are rewards[*] helps provide an evolutionary pressure against those not doing dangerous things, and those failing at them.

[*]: Primary, as in winning wars, or secondary, as in being better paid than average or attracting more mates.

That you can toss a wrapper into the wastebin from across the room, that you can walk for miles, and that you can balance on a bike are likely all because of your ancestors doing dangerous things. It paid off.

As for menial tasks, the same applies, Being good at those too lends an advantage.

We have this big thing on top of our necks, and really complicated protein factory patterns. We can afford to be good at a lot of things, much more so than most of our cousin species. But that's only to our advantage if we do become good at things, and fill that squishy bulb.
I firmly believe that that includes doing both dangerous and menial things.

Which is why I'm now getting into my car, challenging death on the county road to do menial tasks like benchmarking at work. Have a nice day!

Re: Unsurprising

[angel'o'sphere]

On radar you don't need pattern recognition.
It tells you exactly where the object is and after three "blibs" exactly what course it is going.

Cameras and pattern recognition are fast enough since decades on mediocre hardware.

Also: AIs kill human pilots in air combat since 20 years or longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (not about air combat but AI/AL)

Those Norns where bred in an UK university in the late 1990s and were basically unbeatable in air combat. A bit strange that news about the topic is on /. today. It is pretty old news. It was not actually Norns, but a sister "species", forgot their name.

Re:Unsurprising

[funky49]

Billboards and other sources of ambiguous sensory input will be banned from roads.

When drivers don't have to look at their own dashboard, they are more likely to look at billboards and other sources of ambiguous sensory input.

Re: Unsurprising

[swb]

My uncle flew reconnaissance F4s in Viet Nam and he has a copy of a belly camera photo taken by another pilot as he dodged a SAM. He rolled his plane just right and the camera captured the missile flying by.

Re: Unsurprising

[rocket rancher]

Just...no. There is a fixed amount of energy available to airborne objects in a dogfight, and most of it comes from the initial velocities of the objects at the start of the encounter. Think of it like a mana pool for your caster class -- missiles just sip it while fighters gulp it down. Each new vector acquired by an aircraft or missile bleeds off available energy, so encounters are necessarily brief. And missiles have another big advantage that is energy related: You can always fire another missile, which starts with a refreshed mana pool. The fighter's mana pool never gets refreshed.

So...the push to make fighters more maneuverable was to evade missile threats from the ground and air. Forward canards, vectored thrust, and variable geometry wings were developed to decrease the amount of energy required for a given change in vector required to defend against missiles, whose significantly smaller mass moment arms (four orders of magnitude smaller) made them inherently more maneuverable. And while it is (read: was) true that defeating the first several generations of missiles was possible by knowing and evading their ever-increasing sensor cone, that is most emphatically no longer the case, and hasn't been for a decade. During my time at the rocket ranch in the late nineties-early 2000s, I saw videos of Russian air-to-air weapons systems that made the fighter types in the briefings gulp in dismay. Passive (stealth) and active ECM are the only ways we have of defeating these current threats if we insist on having big, energy gulping objects that need to defend against smaller, more maneuverable objects that only sip at the available energy pool.

And don't discount the notion of disposability -- missiles, after all, are by definition disposable. But a kinetic kill doesn't necessarily mean that *both* objects have to be destroyed in a given encounter. A hypersonic missile equipped with a chaff ejector stuffed with depleted uranium ball bearings instead of magnesium can deliver enough energy against the cockpit of a fighter (structurally the weakest point because of human pilots' need to see with their own eyes) to guarantee a kill (literally, in this case.) And it probably still has enough energy to find and attack another target or three, effectively nullifying your kamikaze-aircraft-is-too-expensive disposability argument.

Re: Unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Video footage of F16 evading SAMs during first Gulf War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uh4yMAx2UA

Why are we still using Human Pilots?

[dwillden]

Because when we automate war and remove the risk of losses on our side, it becomes too easy to just throw more robots into a situation. War is not something that should be automated, we need to retain the potential of real losses to restrain our desire to engage in war. Even extensive use of drones is taking us dangerously down that path. We can kill those who oppose or offend us without risk of our own losses and thus we have little cause for showing restraint in using such equipment to conduct our foreign policy.

Oh and Skynet!!!

G-force limits, too

[Richard Kirk]

This is probably old data, but few pilots in special, elasticated suits can get beyond 10g without blacking out. As we approach our limit, our peripheral vision goes, so even if we don't black out, we are not working well if we keep this up for long. It is possible to make conventional airframes that can take 25g if you don't have to cut big holes in the airframe for the cockpit. So, a computer in a plane built for a computer ought to rule.

Most A/A kills result from not being seen

[bkmoore]

Since the first world war, most air to air kills were scored against opponents that did not see their attacker. The preferred tactic was to come out of the sun or attack from a blind spot. The Red Baron stated, "I get real close, pull the trigger, and he blows up", or something to that effect. An AI- piloted airplane would have this same limitation, as it would only be aware of what its sensors tell it. If you jam its on board sensors and data-link capability, all that AI won't be worth anything. What this has to do with the F-35, I don't know? Unless it's just to flame an airplane that a lot of arm-chair experts don't like. There are lots of missions for a manned airplane, and "dogfighting" (or BFM) is a tactic and not not a mission.

Re:Fighters becoming an anachronism, like horse ca

[lgw]

he big advantage of a pilot over a drone is that you can't jam or spoof a pilot.

How does that apply when you're engaging outside of visual range? Even in a "dogfight with guns" the HUD is showing the pilot where and when to shoot. For other missions, sure, that's relevant, but not so much for air-to-air.

The main thing the pilot adds is judgement that can't be jammed or spoofed in a situation short of war. Is that incoming plane attacking, or an airliner on an unfortunate approach? You need eyeballs on the target, and humans are better than cameras for that in a situation when hostility is unlikely.