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

Posted by BeauHD on from the rise-of-the-machines dept.

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."

6 of 441 comments (clear)

  1. Unsurprising by fredgiblet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re: Unsurprising by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!

    2. Re: Unsurprising by rocket+rancher · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Why are we still using Human Pilots? by dwillden · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!!!

    --
    I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
  3. G-force limits, too by Richard+Kirk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Most A/A kills result from not being seen by bkmoore · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.