3 ms·

> there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour I Googled about this. London Heathrow is widely regarded as the busiest two runway airport in the world. They al

by throwaway2037 2y ago

> there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour I Googled about this. London Heathrow is widely regarded as the busiest two runway airport in the world. They allow less than 50 arrival per hour. Are there any airports in the world that can have "hundreds of arrivals per hour"? Conservatively, 200 can be considered "hundreds", then you would need 8x runways operating at max capacity. That seems hard to imagine. Google also tells me that Atlanta (normally the business airport in the US) can handle about 250 "operations" per hour, so let's say half for arrivals. Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.

refulgentis 2y ago
> Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos. Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly, recently, by the # of people who breezily stumble through quarter-baked thoughts while speaking dismissively, as if they've covered the surface of a complex universe that has been worked on very many smart people for decades, and now we can get to the real singular problem that'd fix everything, the one thing they've identified. I don't even know where to begin trying to interlocute when the starting premise is "3D is hard for modern computers." So I speak straightforwardly, in a way that I wish wouldn't be seen as rude, but it is. So it goes. You're right about the arrivals, but you missed the forest for the trees in the comment you're replying to.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  You're reading into it too much. It wasn't dismissive. And the framing of "3d" is a reasonable followup to the train comparison.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Well, if it wasn't, it certainly is now! ;)
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      ?? I have no idea what this means. Are you implying your reply would make the previous post become dismissive?
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        "It" is an indefinite pronoun, meaning, "it" is by definition unclear to anyone but the speaker. Here, "it" means "your involvement in this discussion" To put it a bit more plainly, and apologies if it is hard to hear currently, I'd find this very helpful to hear this if I were you: - The first comment was objectively, straightforwardly, dismissive. You questioned one statistic, then ignored the thrust of the comment and the comments leading up to it, instead framing the difficulty as "modern computers have a hard time with 3D", eliding the main point communicated. - You then replied to my comment to tell me I'm wrong, it wasn't dismissive. This is also, in itself, dismissive. I had already fisked you, and I felt bad, so I didn't want to get overly literal and criticize you roughly again, in front of a crowd, so soon. So, I choose to keep it brief, rely on your ability to recognize the irony in your reply being dismissive in telling me the original comment wasn't dismissive, especially when combined with the wink. To be hyper clear, it's...unusual...when communicating with others to ignore most of what they just said and fixate on one illustrative part of what they said, then when told you were being dismissive, to just say "I wasn't being dismissive" and put the burden on the listener. It's so unusual as to be objectively amusing. You certainly did not mean to be dismissive, but you were. I sympathize with the reflex, I am 100% sure I've made many similar errors in my own journey, probably more than you ever have and will. It is a problem area for me. With humility, I'd humbly suggest that when given feedback, rather than briefly asserting the feedback is incorrect, you come with curiosity and ask why it came off that way. Given their answer, you'll be able to tell very quickly if the person is having a bad day/picking on you, or if you were unclear.
- kristjansson 2y ago
  We’ve built good enough systems that lots of people have never had engage with the complexity of reality?
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Great, concise, thought that wraps together some of my other bugaboos. Will be stealing it for many years to come :)
rtpg 2y ago
I think the 3D part is fine, it's more "all of physics" coming into play with a plane. Like bird strikes, engine failures, trying to decide how to handle that. What is the loss function the AI is supposed to apply if an emergency landing is needed? And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that. So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out. On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over. If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough. This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.
- jon-wood 2y ago
  > If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated. In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.
kristjansson 2y ago
The happy path is easy, as you imagine. It’s all the other imaginable and unimaginable paths, each unhappy in their own way… Oh and thousands of lives hang in the literal balance
matwood 2y ago
It's not just a 3D problem. It's all of the management in the air and on the ground. Could a computer eventually do it autonomously? I would think eventually, but the problem is handling exceptions. The Navy has been experimenting for years with a digital replacement of their Ouija board analog flight deck management tool for carriers [1]. And even then, people are still making most of the decisions. And ATL is a crazy busy airport (there's an old doc on Netflix I think which is interesting). To confirm your question, ATL can run 5 runways nearly continuously[2]. It would be interesting to know what they peak at during a busy Monday morning, but my guess is they are more constrained by gate space at this point. [1] https://newatlas.com/us-navy-ouija-board/50087/ https://newatlas.com/us-navy-ouija-board/50087/ [2] https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/hartsfield-jackson-atlanta-international-airport/#:~:text=Having%20five%20parallel%20runways%20makes,may%20depart%20in%20an%20hour. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-econom...
stouset 2y ago
I should have said “arrivals and departures”. KATL has 2,100–2,700 arrivals and departures per day. Even if we assume those are equally spaced throughout the day (they aren’t) we’re over 100/hour. But sure. It’s a mild exaggeration. It still doesn’t change the core point. 3D isn’t just “magically hard” for computers, but the process for routing traffic is wildly complex and a bunch of planes arriving and leaving at semi-random times, directions, and with different requirements and capabilities is where the problem starts not finishes. The happy path is relatively easy. The exceptions are innumerable.

refulgentis 2y ago

> Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos. Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly, recently, by the # of people who breezily stumble through quarter-baked thoughts while speaking dismissively, as if they've covered the surface of a complex universe that has been worked on very many smart people for decades, and now we can get to the real singular problem that'd fix everything, the one thing they've identified. I don't even know where to begin trying to interlocute when the starting premise is "3D is hard for modern computers." So I speak straightforwardly, in a way that I wish wouldn't be seen as rude, but it is. So it goes. You're right about the arrivals, but you missed the forest for the trees in the comment you're replying to.

Dylan16807 2y ago
You're reading into it too much. It wasn't dismissive. And the framing of "3d" is a reasonable followup to the train comparison.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Well, if it wasn't, it certainly is now! ;)
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    ?? I have no idea what this means. Are you implying your reply would make the previous post become dismissive?
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      "It" is an indefinite pronoun, meaning, "it" is by definition unclear to anyone but the speaker. Here, "it" means "your involvement in this discussion" To put it a bit more plainly, and apologies if it is hard to hear currently, I'd find this very helpful to hear this if I were you: - The first comment was objectively, straightforwardly, dismissive. You questioned one statistic, then ignored the thrust of the comment and the comments leading up to it, instead framing the difficulty as "modern computers have a hard time with 3D", eliding the main point communicated. - You then replied to my comment to tell me I'm wrong, it wasn't dismissive. This is also, in itself, dismissive. I had already fisked you, and I felt bad, so I didn't want to get overly literal and criticize you roughly again, in front of a crowd, so soon. So, I choose to keep it brief, rely on your ability to recognize the irony in your reply being dismissive in telling me the original comment wasn't dismissive, especially when combined with the wink. To be hyper clear, it's...unusual...when communicating with others to ignore most of what they just said and fixate on one illustrative part of what they said, then when told you were being dismissive, to just say "I wasn't being dismissive" and put the burden on the listener. It's so unusual as to be objectively amusing. You certainly did not mean to be dismissive, but you were. I sympathize with the reflex, I am 100% sure I've made many similar errors in my own journey, probably more than you ever have and will. It is a problem area for me. With humility, I'd humbly suggest that when given feedback, rather than briefly asserting the feedback is incorrect, you come with curiosity and ask why it came off that way. Given their answer, you'll be able to tell very quickly if the person is having a bad day/picking on you, or if you were unclear.
kristjansson 2y ago
We’ve built good enough systems that lots of people have never had engage with the complexity of reality?
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Great, concise, thought that wraps together some of my other bugaboos. Will be stealing it for many years to come :)

rtpg 2y ago

I think the 3D part is fine, it's more "all of physics" coming into play with a plane. Like bird strikes, engine failures, trying to decide how to handle that. What is the loss function the AI is supposed to apply if an emergency landing is needed? And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that. So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out. On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over. If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough. This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.

jon-wood 2y ago
> If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated. In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.

kristjansson 2y ago

The happy path is easy, as you imagine. It’s all the other imaginable and unimaginable paths, each unhappy in their own way… Oh and thousands of lives hang in the literal balance

matwood 2y ago

It's not just a 3D problem. It's all of the management in the air and on the ground. Could a computer eventually do it autonomously? I would think eventually, but the problem is handling exceptions. The Navy has been experimenting for years with a digital replacement of their Ouija board analog flight deck management tool for carriers [1]. And even then, people are still making most of the decisions. And ATL is a crazy busy airport (there's an old doc on Netflix I think which is interesting). To confirm your question, ATL can run 5 runways nearly continuously[2]. It would be interesting to know what they peak at during a busy Monday morning, but my guess is they are more constrained by gate space at this point. [1] https://newatlas.com/us-navy-ouija-board/50087/ https://newatlas.com/us-navy-ouija-board/50087/ [2] https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/hartsfield-jackson-atlanta-international-airport/#:~:text=Having%20five%20parallel%20runways%20makes,may%20depart%20in%20an%20hour. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-econom...

stouset 2y ago

I should have said “arrivals and departures”. KATL has 2,100–2,700 arrivals and departures per day. Even if we assume those are equally spaced throughout the day (they aren’t) we’re over 100/hour. But sure. It’s a mild exaggeration. It still doesn’t change the core point. 3D isn’t just “magically hard” for computers, but the process for routing traffic is wildly complex and a bunch of planes arriving and leaving at semi-random times, directions, and with different requirements and capabilities is where the problem starts not finishes. The happy path is relatively easy. The exceptions are innumerable.