14 ms·

AI fighter pilot wins in combat simulation

202 points by tpatke 10y ago

Aelinsaar 10y ago
That's interesting, but it had a 2:1 numerical advantage too, which does matter.
- pmontra 10y ago
  It does matter, but AIs could fly different fighter jets from the ones human pilots fly with in future. Smaller, more maneuverable, they could have a sizable technological advantage. If they are comparable today they'll be no match for fighter jets limited by the presence of human pilots. Ground to air missiles will become more important for countries with no military AI capabilities.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    That makes sense, given that human pilots can only take so many G's.
    - kingmanaz 10y ago
      For an anime depiction of a human pilot reaching the limits of G forces while attempting to overcome an AI pilot unrestricted by G forces, search youtube for "yf-21 vs X-9", or, "Guld's Death". I've also posted the link in a comment above.
vbo 10y ago
If we assume the wars of the future to be fought by AI-driven warmachines, can we abstract the matter further and have virtual wars? Our AI versus your AI fighting on computational resources provided by, erm, Switzerland. Nobody gets hurt and no money is spent building and destroying warplanes. Everybody wins. And have a prize pot, so actual invasion of territory is not necessary. Bulletproof solution, may I say. What do you mean it won't work?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Curiously, that happens already. Simulations are run on battles before they are fought until a winning tactic is found.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Now if only we could get the losing party to accept the outcome of their simulations too and to capitulate. In practice, the losing party as often as not will try to inflict as much damage on the victor as they can, and more often than not what starts as a battle ends up being a long term occupation and that's when all simulations seem to break down. Battles are 'easy', long term planning is not.
    - XorNot 10y ago
      Actually it's more that the loser has to genuinely believe the result of the outcome. And amongst a population, the demographic of rebellious young adults tends not to accept outcomes like that...but of course that also becomes part of the calculus: can you accept expected losses of occupation forces?
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Nobody that loses a virtual war is going to give up and let the other side take what they want without a very violent fight.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    But it worked on Star Trek!
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - teraformer 10y ago
    For this to work, every aspect of the simulation would have to match up with real world circumstances. ...which would mean no secrets. ...or weapons that, when used, obviate many degrees of secrecy, like nuclear weapons.
linschn 10y ago
I read the paper, and read up about the techniques used to do that (because the paper is very light on details). I came back completely underwhelmed. This makes (clever) use of hundreds, if not thousands, man hours of painstakingly entering expert rules if the form IF <some input value is above or below some threshold> THEN <put some output value in the so and so range>. The mathematical model of Fuzzy Trees is nice, but this is completely ad-hoc to the specific modelization of the problem, and will fail to generalize to any other problem space. This kind of techniques has some nice properties (its "reasonings" are understandable and thus kind of debuggable and kind of provable, it smoothes some logic rules that would otherwise naively lead to non smooth control, etc.) but despite the advances presented here that seem to make the computation of the model tractable, I don't see how it could make the actual definition of model anywhere near tractable. Also, I dislike having to wade though multiple pages of advertising before I can find the (very light) scientific content. -- Edit: I realize I am very negative here. I do not mean to disparage the work done by the authors. It's just that the way it is presented make it sound way more impressive than it is. It's still interesting and novative work.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Some rules can be derived from instrumenting humans as they perform the maneuvers, and generalizing from their behavior? We used to instrument motorcycle riders at Harley Davidson and create fuzzy-logic models of expert riders as they performed certain acts on a track (dodging road hazard; emergency stop; hairpin turn). Our goal was also a fuzzy-logic driver model, which they used to help design new motorcycle suspensions/steering that would feel 'natural' to an expert rider e.g. mesh well with the model they had for an expert.
  - linschn 10y ago
    I asked myself the same question, and did read some papers, but could not find a recent comprehensive survey on automatic fuzzy rule generation (I admit I gave up after ~15 minutes). What I found did not convince me that it would fare better than an off-the-shelf (somewhat) non-interpretable statistical supervised learning algorithm. It can be a nice way of bootstrapping the rule writing process, or to go the other way : to discover and analyze new expert knowledge by looking at the rules. But performance-wise, I would go the machine learning way anytime. Also, Inverse Reinforcement Learning seems to be very promising : one guesses the reward function by observing the expert acting.
Aardwolf 10y ago
They did only one simulation? Strange to report on details of one single simulation when more makes sense. Why not do hundreds of simulations, with different amounts of attacking and defending jets. Sounds like fun, must not be a problem to find pilots who want to do this simulation, it's merely hundreds of hours of gameplay :). Or was it like, they did hundreds, but this is the only one where the AI won, and it had 4 planes while the humans had only 2?
prodmerc 10y ago
Huh, couple that with an aircraft not bound by human limits (no life support, much faster maneuvering with no loss in decision making) and it should be awesome. And terrifying.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  There is a terrible sci-fi film called Stealth that explores some of that.
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  you mean drone?
  - vlehto 10y ago
    Or missile. There is terrific range advantage if you only fly half of the round trip.
cygnus_a 10y ago
MAD is the future. And righteousness is the enemy. Don't mess with us. Don't mess with them. Also, do the world a favor, and don't innovate new weapons. They leave an indelible affect on the collective mind.
- sevenless 10y ago
  Problem is the undeniable fact that much innovation comes out of human conflict. Even our basic laws of thermodynamics come out of experiments in cannon-boring.
AKifer 10y ago
In every considerations, an AI pilot has all the advantages in a physical combat, no G force limit, precise maneuvers, instant reactions, full time awareness. The only question is, will the rules of war allow an AI to kill a human ? Or how a human decision can be inserted in the loop.
- sevenless 10y ago
  I would think the AI's instructions are to neutralize the enemy, not to kill any humans. It will not be shooting at the pilot if he bails out.
- Symmetry 10y ago
  We already let robotic missiles kill humans, why not robotic planes? It's important to keep humans in the loop somewhere but they can be back on the AWACS overseeing the squadron.
- neurotech1 10y ago
  If a hypothetical drone pulled 9Gs+ in extreme maneuvers routinely, the USAF would be buying a new drone pretty quick. Even without weapons load, the service life would be short as a few years. This is precisely what happened when the US Navy F-16Ns were used exclusively by TOPGUN, and had a short service life before the airframe developed cracks and went to the boneyard. These jets were flown harder than the USAF flew them in operational service. Also, the aerodynamic control surface effectiveness on fighter jets does not allow rapid reversals at some magic level significantly beyond what a human pilot can handle. An old A-4 Skyhawk can roll beyond 360 degrees a second with a human pilot. Another issue is that thrust vectored aircraft like the F-22 Raptor, will rapidly loose airspeed at a relatively low sustained turn rate. This turn rate is way less than the 9G maximum of the aircraft. Additionally, An F-22 (91-4003) was effectively written off after a -11G overstress mishap. The pilot was okay, but the jet never flew again. To fly a fighter in an expanded G envelope would require additional weight, negating some of the benefits of unmanned fighters.
  - jethro 10y ago
    really you can't design a machine that handles more than 10g's? the designers are targeting a certain g-limit assumed for the pilots, and then make the plane as light as possible. perhaps we will see hybrids in the intermediate term : humans providing guidance to the unmanned craft (with latency and jammability) and the craft autonomously doing the low latency fighting. i'm not sure this is "worse" if all the planes are unmanned. granted any fighting is bad. this also has big implications for design -- reliability requirements, disposability change. one way missions. the comments re: once the virtual fight ends the humans start fighting, i don't think so. they won't be as good, else the ai version wouldn't be in service, so that would be pointless.
gldalmaso 10y ago
I imagine in real life conditions adversaries would focus on sensory attack types then? Are there sensors that are immune to scrambling and bad data?
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  There aren't, but this applies to human sensors as well. The only human sensor that's any use in a dogfight is optical, and you can make optical sensors that perform a lot better than the human eye in regards to magnification, etc.
matheweis 10y ago
They made a movie about this in 2005 (Stealth); looks like it's only taken 10 years for the first half of the plot to unfold. Now we just need the AI to go rogue and target it's master ;)
- talmand 10y ago
  But we seem to missing the planes that can fly halfway around the world in less than half an hour on less than one tank of gas.
- giardini 10y ago
  Sort of like these: "Dark Star - Bomb Philosophy- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29pPZQ77cmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29pPZQ77cmI and the conclusion "Dark Star - let there be light"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-Niv2Xh7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-Niv2Xh7w
ADanFromCanada 10y ago
News at 11. One robot pilot beats another robot pilot. "The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft - and did not suffer any losses." "Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also triumphed in simulation against a retired human fighter pilot." Key words here are "also" and "simulation" and "retired". Click bait much?
dmvaldman 10y ago
I find myself imagining a world where the weapons trade is replaced with bootlegged AI software trade.
jameshart 10y ago
AIs beat humans in simulated combat continually. It's called 'losing a life in a video game'.
kingmanaz 10y ago
In the clip below, one of mankind's last manned aircraft pilots--flying his fighter with a mind interface--attempts to destroy his AI-controlled fighter replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hJepWBUqZk#t=0m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hJepWBUqZk#t=0m20s Perhaps honor can't be programmed.
ourmandave 10y ago
My first thought was of that little bastard UFO in Asteroids. It's pew-pew gun would never miss me.
juandazapata 10y ago
ONE simulation? This is hardly news. It'd be more interesting if they did hundreds or thousands of simulation. One data point means nothing statistically.
ratsimihah 10y ago
Ender's Game!
partycoder 10y ago
Can be deadly, but if it's predictable it can be controlled. For example, a gator. A gator is deadly, but can be manipulated because of its predictability.
infinotize 10y ago
I've been losing to the AI fighter pilots in DCS:World[0] for years. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Combat_Simulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Combat_Simulator
hackuser 10y ago
The Pentagon is betting on human-AI teaming, called 'Centaurs'. The foundational story is this: Back in the late 1990s, Deep Blue beat the best human chess player, a demonstration of the power of AI. Around ten years later, a tournament of individual grandmasters and individual AIs was won by ... some amateur chess players teamed with AIs. AIs aren't good at dealing with novel situations, humans are; they complement each other (and I'll add: unlike most other endeavors, in war the environment (the enemy) is desperately striving to confuse you and do the unexpected. Your self-parking car would have more trouble if someone was trying everything they could think of to stop it, as if their survival was at stake). Also, we strongly prefer humans make life-and-death decisions; hopefully that turns out to be realistic.
Negative1 10y ago
AI Fighter Pilots have been killing me in Flight Simulations for at least 30 years now using similar systems. From the paper, they basically use an expert system using something they call a Genetic Fuzzy Tree (GFT), which seems suspiciously like a Behavior Tree where the nodes are trained. They trained the GFT then had it go up against itself where Red team was the 'enhanced' AI and Blue was supposed to be the human (this part was odd to me). After they completed the training they put it up against real veteran pilots and the AI basically did a few things. It would take evasive maneuvers when fired upon and fire when in optimal range. That's pretty much it. And you know what? That's really all modern pilots need to do. It's amazing what they did with Top Gun, making this stuff not look boring. In the end of the day it's just wait for some computer to tell you that you have target lock and press a button. If attacked, take evasive maneuvers and pray. Takeoff and landing on a Carrier is the scariest part. I'm quite curious how this system would perform in WWII era dogfights where you had to worry about the stress on your plane, had to deal with engines that failed and stalled all the time and maneuvers that were much slower and closer to the enemy (plus no missiles). Even so, I enjoyed reading the paper (not the article) so would recommend it if you're into Game AI at all.
- rwallace 10y ago
  You're saying modern air to air combat is relatively simple and doesn't require that much pilot skill? If that's the case, why do all the accounts of the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars claim pilot skill was perhaps the single largest advantage the Americans and British had over the Iraqis? (Not a rhetorical question; I don't know what the specifics of the task consist of, and I'm curious about the answer.)
  - crazypyro 10y ago
    Not saying this has any relation in this specific case, but both of those governments have made up similar lies about pilot ability (British in WWII with radar hidden by "pilots who eat carrots to improve eyesight" is the classic example) in the past to hide technological advancements.
  - neurotech1 10y ago
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
> Because a simulated fighter jet produces so much data for interpretation, it is not always obvious which manoeuvre is most advantageous or, indeed, at what point a weapon should be fired. This is changing very rapidly with hardware-accelerated RNN chips being researched by Google and facebook. I wonder about communication though. All the enemy fighter needs to do is jam any signals used by the jets to communicate. I wonder if they could rely on laser/line-of-sight communication instead of RF frequencies.
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
Does it go without saying that actually running a simulation is super easy? At times I feel locked in by my operating system, so I wonder how these guys did it.
tdy721 10y ago
Was this Raspberry Pi powered? This story makes that claim: http://www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-raspberry-pi-pilot-ai-475291 http://www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-raspberry-pi... If that is true, it puts this achievement in a totally different class.
- Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
  Well, why not? the computers they have in those extreme situations are not the newest Intel xeons. Battle tested and reliable computers are years behind their more modern desktop counterparts.
fedxc 10y ago
Why is this news? I lose to AI games all the time...
sleepybrett 10y ago
I imagine an AI pilot always has a path to victory since they aren't subject to red/black-out and can thus pull crazier maneuver than their human counterparts.
- euyyn 10y ago
  This is a very interesting thought. So much effort goes into the Human Factors of fighter planes (they started the field after all), that it'd be super interesting to see what a "fighter drone" looks like.
  - bathMarm0t 10y ago
    You've surely seen this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45 Very stealthy (no bucket/glass where the pilot has to sit). Huge amounts of lift available for high G maneuvers. Infinite air-time given a re-supply tanker is in the area.
  - vlehto 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-to-air_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-to-air_missile I know the train of thought. Once I spent hour thinking of "design dirt" that sticks to machine parts and protects them from real dirt and oxidation. Then it occurred to me that it's called "paint".
jjwiseman 10y ago
I'd like to know how this system compares to TacAir-Soar: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/laird/papers/AIMag99.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/laird/papers/AIMag99.html
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
For those who read this piece of news and don't understand why there is no mention of machine learning, neural networks and deep learning, that's because the system described is a typical fuzzy logic Expert System, a mainstay of Good, Old-Fashioned AI. In short, it's a hand-crafted database of rules in a format similar to "IF Condition THEN Action" coupled to an inference procedure (or a few different ones). That sort of thing is called an "expert system" because it's meant to encode the knowledge of experts. Some machine learning algorithms, particularly Decision Tree learners, were proposed as a way to automate this process of elicitation of expert knowledge and the construction of rules from it. As to the "fuzzy logic" bit, that's a kind of logic where a fact is true or false by degrees. When a threshold is crossed, a fact becomes true (or false) or a rule "fires" and the system changes state, ish. It all may sound a bit hairy but it's actually a pretty natural way of constructing knowledge-based systems that must implement complex rules. In fact, any programmer who has ever had to code complex business logic into a program has created a de facto expert system, even if they didn't call it that. For those with a bit of time in their hand, this is a nice intro: http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS09/KI/folien/merritt.pdf http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS09/KI/folien/merritt.pdf
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  Also, I should say: I'm really sorry this news had to be about an automated weapon. That sucks.
  - Retra 10y ago
    It wouldn't be news if it weren't about a weapon. Or rather, it wouldn't have grabbed your attention.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
      It grabbed my attention because it's an expert system with fuzzy logic rules and I have an interest in those. I'm not interested in their military applications.
pc2g4d 10y ago
Fighter jets feel like something that could be effectively tackled using genetic algorithms. Algorithms that get shot down are weeded out. Algorithms that shoot down enemies are promoted. Yeah?
- imaginenore 10y ago
  Yes, but only if your simulations are very close to the real world. Usually that means they are very slow. I feel like swarms of cheap, fast, unmanned aircraft that communicate efficiently and orchestrate their behavior with AI will prevail in the end.
- flukus 10y ago
  I think the latter is what you want to select for, otherwise you might end up with jets that are too risk averse. Mass manufactured, disposable machines would work better when you don't have to worry about pilot training.
willangley 10y ago
The Alpha paper, "Genetic Fuzzy based Artificial Intelligence for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle Control in Simulated Air Combat Missions" is open access and available online: http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/genetic-fuzzy-based-artificial-intelligence-for-unmanned-combat-aerialvehicle-control-in-simulated-air-combat-missions-2167-0374-1000144.pdf http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/genetic-fuzzy-based-artif...
SocksCanClose 10y ago
For many years John Boyd and the "Fighter Mafia" helped to plan, build, test, and then manufacture fighters that had optimal "performance envelopes" that enabled them to maintain dominance in the sky. Perhaps this concept means that the new "performance envelope" is going to be one of software. This argument is fleshed out here: http://warontherocks.com/2016/02/imagine-the-starling-peak-fighter-the-swarm-and-the-future-of-air-combat/ http://warontherocks.com/2016/02/imagine-the-starling-peak-f...
sandworm101 10y ago
What form of combat was this? It sounds as if they were dogfighting, something that is more myth than reality these days. Fighters fight but they don't engage on the equal terms, the duel we see in films. What were the BVR conditions? Was this a missile fight or with cannons? The concept of two flights approaching each other, seeing each other, and not engaging until they are in dogfighting range is silly. To get two modern fighters close enough for a proper turning fight at least one side will have to be taken by surprise. Otherwise, the long-range missile fight will either decide the matter or place one side in such a poor position that they will withdraw. (Either they are down or will have so reduced their energy that a turning fight isn't an option.)

202 points by tpatke 10y ago

Aelinsaar 10y ago

That's interesting, but it had a 2:1 numerical advantage too, which does matter.

pmontra 10y ago
It does matter, but AIs could fly different fighter jets from the ones human pilots fly with in future. Smaller, more maneuverable, they could have a sizable technological advantage. If they are comparable today they'll be no match for fighter jets limited by the presence of human pilots. Ground to air missiles will become more important for countries with no military AI capabilities.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  That makes sense, given that human pilots can only take so many G's.
  - kingmanaz 10y ago
    For an anime depiction of a human pilot reaching the limits of G forces while attempting to overcome an AI pilot unrestricted by G forces, search youtube for "yf-21 vs X-9", or, "Guld's Death". I've also posted the link in a comment above.

vbo 10y ago

If we assume the wars of the future to be fought by AI-driven warmachines, can we abstract the matter further and have virtual wars? Our AI versus your AI fighting on computational resources provided by, erm, Switzerland. Nobody gets hurt and no money is spent building and destroying warplanes. Everybody wins. And have a prize pot, so actual invasion of territory is not necessary. Bulletproof solution, may I say. What do you mean it won't work?

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Curiously, that happens already. Simulations are run on battles before they are fought until a winning tactic is found.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Now if only we could get the losing party to accept the outcome of their simulations too and to capitulate. In practice, the losing party as often as not will try to inflict as much damage on the victor as they can, and more often than not what starts as a battle ends up being a long term occupation and that's when all simulations seem to break down. Battles are 'easy', long term planning is not.
  - XorNot 10y ago
    Actually it's more that the loser has to genuinely believe the result of the outcome. And amongst a population, the demographic of rebellious young adults tends not to accept outcomes like that...but of course that also becomes part of the calculus: can you accept expected losses of occupation forces?
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Nobody that loses a virtual war is going to give up and let the other side take what they want without a very violent fight.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  But it worked on Star Trek!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- teraformer 10y ago
  For this to work, every aspect of the simulation would have to match up with real world circumstances. ...which would mean no secrets. ...or weapons that, when used, obviate many degrees of secrecy, like nuclear weapons.

linschn 10y ago

I read the paper, and read up about the techniques used to do that (because the paper is very light on details). I came back completely underwhelmed. This makes (clever) use of hundreds, if not thousands, man hours of painstakingly entering expert rules if the form IF <some input value is above or below some threshold> THEN <put some output value in the so and so range>. The mathematical model of Fuzzy Trees is nice, but this is completely ad-hoc to the specific modelization of the problem, and will fail to generalize to any other problem space. This kind of techniques has some nice properties (its "reasonings" are understandable and thus kind of debuggable and kind of provable, it smoothes some logic rules that would otherwise naively lead to non smooth control, etc.) but despite the advances presented here that seem to make the computation of the model tractable, I don't see how it could make the actual definition of model anywhere near tractable. Also, I dislike having to wade though multiple pages of advertising before I can find the (very light) scientific content. -- Edit: I realize I am very negative here. I do not mean to disparage the work done by the authors. It's just that the way it is presented make it sound way more impressive than it is. It's still interesting and novative work.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Some rules can be derived from instrumenting humans as they perform the maneuvers, and generalizing from their behavior? We used to instrument motorcycle riders at Harley Davidson and create fuzzy-logic models of expert riders as they performed certain acts on a track (dodging road hazard; emergency stop; hairpin turn). Our goal was also a fuzzy-logic driver model, which they used to help design new motorcycle suspensions/steering that would feel 'natural' to an expert rider e.g. mesh well with the model they had for an expert.
- linschn 10y ago
  I asked myself the same question, and did read some papers, but could not find a recent comprehensive survey on automatic fuzzy rule generation (I admit I gave up after ~15 minutes). What I found did not convince me that it would fare better than an off-the-shelf (somewhat) non-interpretable statistical supervised learning algorithm. It can be a nice way of bootstrapping the rule writing process, or to go the other way : to discover and analyze new expert knowledge by looking at the rules. But performance-wise, I would go the machine learning way anytime. Also, Inverse Reinforcement Learning seems to be very promising : one guesses the reward function by observing the expert acting.

Aardwolf 10y ago

They did only one simulation? Strange to report on details of one single simulation when more makes sense. Why not do hundreds of simulations, with different amounts of attacking and defending jets. Sounds like fun, must not be a problem to find pilots who want to do this simulation, it's merely hundreds of hours of gameplay :). Or was it like, they did hundreds, but this is the only one where the AI won, and it had 4 planes while the humans had only 2?

prodmerc 10y ago

Huh, couple that with an aircraft not bound by human limits (no life support, much faster maneuvering with no loss in decision making) and it should be awesome. And terrifying.

noir_lord 10y ago
There is a terrible sci-fi film called Stealth that explores some of that.
saiya-jin 10y ago
you mean drone?
- vlehto 10y ago
  Or missile. There is terrific range advantage if you only fly half of the round trip.

cygnus_a 10y ago

MAD is the future. And righteousness is the enemy. Don't mess with us. Don't mess with them. Also, do the world a favor, and don't innovate new weapons. They leave an indelible affect on the collective mind.

sevenless 10y ago
Problem is the undeniable fact that much innovation comes out of human conflict. Even our basic laws of thermodynamics come out of experiments in cannon-boring.

AKifer 10y ago

In every considerations, an AI pilot has all the advantages in a physical combat, no G force limit, precise maneuvers, instant reactions, full time awareness. The only question is, will the rules of war allow an AI to kill a human ? Or how a human decision can be inserted in the loop.

sevenless 10y ago
I would think the AI's instructions are to neutralize the enemy, not to kill any humans. It will not be shooting at the pilot if he bails out.
Symmetry 10y ago
We already let robotic missiles kill humans, why not robotic planes? It's important to keep humans in the loop somewhere but they can be back on the AWACS overseeing the squadron.
neurotech1 10y ago
If a hypothetical drone pulled 9Gs+ in extreme maneuvers routinely, the USAF would be buying a new drone pretty quick. Even without weapons load, the service life would be short as a few years. This is precisely what happened when the US Navy F-16Ns were used exclusively by TOPGUN, and had a short service life before the airframe developed cracks and went to the boneyard. These jets were flown harder than the USAF flew them in operational service. Also, the aerodynamic control surface effectiveness on fighter jets does not allow rapid reversals at some magic level significantly beyond what a human pilot can handle. An old A-4 Skyhawk can roll beyond 360 degrees a second with a human pilot. Another issue is that thrust vectored aircraft like the F-22 Raptor, will rapidly loose airspeed at a relatively low sustained turn rate. This turn rate is way less than the 9G maximum of the aircraft. Additionally, An F-22 (91-4003) was effectively written off after a -11G overstress mishap. The pilot was okay, but the jet never flew again. To fly a fighter in an expanded G envelope would require additional weight, negating some of the benefits of unmanned fighters.
- jethro 10y ago
  really you can't design a machine that handles more than 10g's? the designers are targeting a certain g-limit assumed for the pilots, and then make the plane as light as possible. perhaps we will see hybrids in the intermediate term : humans providing guidance to the unmanned craft (with latency and jammability) and the craft autonomously doing the low latency fighting. i'm not sure this is "worse" if all the planes are unmanned. granted any fighting is bad. this also has big implications for design -- reliability requirements, disposability change. one way missions. the comments re: once the virtual fight ends the humans start fighting, i don't think so. they won't be as good, else the ai version wouldn't be in service, so that would be pointless.

gldalmaso 10y ago

I imagine in real life conditions adversaries would focus on sensory attack types then? Are there sensors that are immune to scrambling and bad data?

CydeWeys 10y ago
There aren't, but this applies to human sensors as well. The only human sensor that's any use in a dogfight is optical, and you can make optical sensors that perform a lot better than the human eye in regards to magnification, etc.

matheweis 10y ago

They made a movie about this in 2005 (Stealth); looks like it's only taken 10 years for the first half of the plot to unfold. Now we just need the AI to go rogue and target it's master ;)

talmand 10y ago
But we seem to missing the planes that can fly halfway around the world in less than half an hour on less than one tank of gas.
giardini 10y ago
Sort of like these: "Dark Star - Bomb Philosophy- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29pPZQ77cmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29pPZQ77cmI and the conclusion "Dark Star - let there be light"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-Niv2Xh7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-Niv2Xh7w

ADanFromCanada 10y ago

News at 11. One robot pilot beats another robot pilot. "The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft - and did not suffer any losses." "Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also triumphed in simulation against a retired human fighter pilot." Key words here are "also" and "simulation" and "retired". Click bait much?

dmvaldman 10y ago

I find myself imagining a world where the weapons trade is replaced with bootlegged AI software trade.

jameshart 10y ago

AIs beat humans in simulated combat continually. It's called 'losing a life in a video game'.

kingmanaz 10y ago

In the clip below, one of mankind's last manned aircraft pilots--flying his fighter with a mind interface--attempts to destroy his AI-controlled fighter replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hJepWBUqZk#t=0m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hJepWBUqZk#t=0m20s Perhaps honor can't be programmed.

ourmandave 10y ago

My first thought was of that little bastard UFO in Asteroids. It's pew-pew gun would never miss me.

juandazapata 10y ago

ONE simulation? This is hardly news. It'd be more interesting if they did hundreds or thousands of simulation. One data point means nothing statistically.

ratsimihah 10y ago

Ender's Game!

partycoder 10y ago

Can be deadly, but if it's predictable it can be controlled. For example, a gator. A gator is deadly, but can be manipulated because of its predictability.

infinotize 10y ago

I've been losing to the AI fighter pilots in DCS:World[0] for years. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Combat_Simulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Combat_Simulator

hackuser 10y ago

The Pentagon is betting on human-AI teaming, called 'Centaurs'. The foundational story is this: Back in the late 1990s, Deep Blue beat the best human chess player, a demonstration of the power of AI. Around ten years later, a tournament of individual grandmasters and individual AIs was won by ... some amateur chess players teamed with AIs. AIs aren't good at dealing with novel situations, humans are; they complement each other (and I'll add: unlike most other endeavors, in war the environment (the enemy) is desperately striving to confuse you and do the unexpected. Your self-parking car would have more trouble if someone was trying everything they could think of to stop it, as if their survival was at stake). Also, we strongly prefer humans make life-and-death decisions; hopefully that turns out to be realistic.

Negative1 10y ago

AI Fighter Pilots have been killing me in Flight Simulations for at least 30 years now using similar systems. From the paper, they basically use an expert system using something they call a Genetic Fuzzy Tree (GFT), which seems suspiciously like a Behavior Tree where the nodes are trained. They trained the GFT then had it go up against itself where Red team was the 'enhanced' AI and Blue was supposed to be the human (this part was odd to me). After they completed the training they put it up against real veteran pilots and the AI basically did a few things. It would take evasive maneuvers when fired upon and fire when in optimal range. That's pretty much it. And you know what? That's really all modern pilots need to do. It's amazing what they did with Top Gun, making this stuff not look boring. In the end of the day it's just wait for some computer to tell you that you have target lock and press a button. If attacked, take evasive maneuvers and pray. Takeoff and landing on a Carrier is the scariest part. I'm quite curious how this system would perform in WWII era dogfights where you had to worry about the stress on your plane, had to deal with engines that failed and stalled all the time and maneuvers that were much slower and closer to the enemy (plus no missiles). Even so, I enjoyed reading the paper (not the article) so would recommend it if you're into Game AI at all.

rwallace 10y ago
You're saying modern air to air combat is relatively simple and doesn't require that much pilot skill? If that's the case, why do all the accounts of the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars claim pilot skill was perhaps the single largest advantage the Americans and British had over the Iraqis? (Not a rhetorical question; I don't know what the specifics of the task consist of, and I'm curious about the answer.)
- crazypyro 10y ago
  Not saying this has any relation in this specific case, but both of those governments have made up similar lies about pilot ability (British in WWII with radar hidden by "pilots who eat carrots to improve eyesight" is the classic example) in the past to hide technological advancements.
- neurotech1 10y ago

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

> Because a simulated fighter jet produces so much data for interpretation, it is not always obvious which manoeuvre is most advantageous or, indeed, at what point a weapon should be fired. This is changing very rapidly with hardware-accelerated RNN chips being researched by Google and facebook. I wonder about communication though. All the enemy fighter needs to do is jam any signals used by the jets to communicate. I wonder if they could rely on laser/line-of-sight communication instead of RF frequencies.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

Does it go without saying that actually running a simulation is super easy? At times I feel locked in by my operating system, so I wonder how these guys did it.

tdy721 10y ago

Was this Raspberry Pi powered? This story makes that claim: http://www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-raspberry-pi-pilot-ai-475291 http://www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-raspberry-pi... If that is true, it puts this achievement in a totally different class.

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
Well, why not? the computers they have in those extreme situations are not the newest Intel xeons. Battle tested and reliable computers are years behind their more modern desktop counterparts.

fedxc 10y ago

Why is this news? I lose to AI games all the time...

sleepybrett 10y ago

I imagine an AI pilot always has a path to victory since they aren't subject to red/black-out and can thus pull crazier maneuver than their human counterparts.

euyyn 10y ago
This is a very interesting thought. So much effort goes into the Human Factors of fighter planes (they started the field after all), that it'd be super interesting to see what a "fighter drone" looks like.
- bathMarm0t 10y ago
  You've surely seen this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45 Very stealthy (no bucket/glass where the pilot has to sit). Huge amounts of lift available for high G maneuvers. Infinite air-time given a re-supply tanker is in the area.
- vlehto 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-to-air_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-to-air_missile I know the train of thought. Once I spent hour thinking of "design dirt" that sticks to machine parts and protects them from real dirt and oxidation. Then it occurred to me that it's called "paint".

jjwiseman 10y ago

I'd like to know how this system compares to TacAir-Soar: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/laird/papers/AIMag99.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/laird/papers/AIMag99.html

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

For those who read this piece of news and don't understand why there is no mention of machine learning, neural networks and deep learning, that's because the system described is a typical fuzzy logic Expert System, a mainstay of Good, Old-Fashioned AI. In short, it's a hand-crafted database of rules in a format similar to "IF Condition THEN Action" coupled to an inference procedure (or a few different ones). That sort of thing is called an "expert system" because it's meant to encode the knowledge of experts. Some machine learning algorithms, particularly Decision Tree learners, were proposed as a way to automate this process of elicitation of expert knowledge and the construction of rules from it. As to the "fuzzy logic" bit, that's a kind of logic where a fact is true or false by degrees. When a threshold is crossed, a fact becomes true (or false) or a rule "fires" and the system changes state, ish. It all may sound a bit hairy but it's actually a pretty natural way of constructing knowledge-based systems that must implement complex rules. In fact, any programmer who has ever had to code complex business logic into a program has created a de facto expert system, even if they didn't call it that. For those with a bit of time in their hand, this is a nice intro: http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS09/KI/folien/merritt.pdf http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS09/KI/folien/merritt.pdf

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
Also, I should say: I'm really sorry this news had to be about an automated weapon. That sucks.
- Retra 10y ago
  It wouldn't be news if it weren't about a weapon. Or rather, it wouldn't have grabbed your attention.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    It grabbed my attention because it's an expert system with fuzzy logic rules and I have an interest in those. I'm not interested in their military applications.

pc2g4d 10y ago

Fighter jets feel like something that could be effectively tackled using genetic algorithms. Algorithms that get shot down are weeded out. Algorithms that shoot down enemies are promoted. Yeah?

imaginenore 10y ago
Yes, but only if your simulations are very close to the real world. Usually that means they are very slow. I feel like swarms of cheap, fast, unmanned aircraft that communicate efficiently and orchestrate their behavior with AI will prevail in the end.
flukus 10y ago
I think the latter is what you want to select for, otherwise you might end up with jets that are too risk averse. Mass manufactured, disposable machines would work better when you don't have to worry about pilot training.

willangley 10y ago

The Alpha paper, "Genetic Fuzzy based Artificial Intelligence for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle Control in Simulated Air Combat Missions" is open access and available online: http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/genetic-fuzzy-based-artificial-intelligence-for-unmanned-combat-aerialvehicle-control-in-simulated-air-combat-missions-2167-0374-1000144.pdf http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/genetic-fuzzy-based-artif...

SocksCanClose 10y ago

For many years John Boyd and the "Fighter Mafia" helped to plan, build, test, and then manufacture fighters that had optimal "performance envelopes" that enabled them to maintain dominance in the sky. Perhaps this concept means that the new "performance envelope" is going to be one of software. This argument is fleshed out here: http://warontherocks.com/2016/02/imagine-the-starling-peak-fighter-the-swarm-and-the-future-of-air-combat/ http://warontherocks.com/2016/02/imagine-the-starling-peak-f...

sandworm101 10y ago

What form of combat was this? It sounds as if they were dogfighting, something that is more myth than reality these days. Fighters fight but they don't engage on the equal terms, the duel we see in films. What were the BVR conditions? Was this a missile fight or with cannons? The concept of two flights approaching each other, seeing each other, and not engaging until they are in dogfighting range is silly. To get two modern fighters close enough for a proper turning fight at least one side will have to be taken by surprise. Otherwise, the long-range missile fight will either decide the matter or place one side in such a poor position that they will withdraw. (Either they are down or will have so reduced their energy that a turning fight isn't an option.)