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I would assume that in a military setting (as it is in most bureocratic/management settings) a solution like this has the immense advantage that one can precise
by svalorzen 10y ago
I would assume that in a military setting (as it is in most bureocratic/management settings) a solution like this has the immense advantage that one can precisely determine the source of any one error to a specific requirement/rule.
It is very hard to ask for management to trust a system they know nothing about, where they have literally no control over final behaviour, even if in the end it will perform better overall. In a rule-based system, instead, it is always possible to make adjustments and blame mistakes very efficiently to specific causes.
I guess this is the main reason why "true" AI is currently being used mostly in information fields, rather than on physical machines and engineering. No-one would know how to deal with the outcome of a fuzzy learned algorithm making the wrong decision. This is also a reason why autonomous cars are very interesting to me, even though I bet they are still full of ad-hoc rules in order to have a layer of "manageability" over the overall system.
- linschn 10y agoI see how it can sound appealing to a bureaucrat, but as a programmer, debugging the concurrent evaluation of thousands of "natural" language IF...THEN... rules until I find the questionable one where a threshold was defined too low or too high sounds like a nightmare.
- bravo22 10y agoI imagine they would log all the inputs, as well as branches taken so they can later replay everything in a debugger. That would make the process much simpler.
- XorNot 10y agoBeing able to take the blackbox recordings of your combat drone which got shot down, reconstruct the scenario and permute the rules till you get a win, seems like...well, a big win. Air combat is also one of those areas which does notionally have narrowly computable victory parameters - given hardware of capabilities X, there is a model we don't know which should generally predict the outcome.
- rbanffy 10y agoAt least you can actually debug it.
- reitanqild 10y agoOnly if you do it wrong? If it ends up like thousands upon thousands of if statements then you got it wrong (or so I think). Getting it right IMO means realizing that rules are not necessarily source code but often data to be iterated over, filtered etc. This is a form of metaprogramming that can be practiced even in Java ;-)
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoThat would indeed be a nightmare, but trying to debug a machine-generated neural network is actually worse.
- euyyn 10y agoRule-based systems have had for a long time the ability to automatically answer queries about why was such or such decision taken.