{"id":888,"date":"2020-08-31T18:18:35","date_gmt":"2020-08-31T16:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/?p=888"},"modified":"2020-09-14T18:19:10","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T16:19:10","slug":"air-combat-by-algorithm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/air-combat-by-algorithm\/","title":{"rendered":"Air Combat by Algorithm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Air Combat by Algorithm<\/strong><\/p>\n

Graham Warwick, Aviation Week, 31.8.2020<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Aviation Week and Space Technology, 31.8.2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 An artificial intelligence algorithm has defeated a human F-16 fighter pilot in a virtual dogfight simulation.<\/p>\n

The Aug. 20 event was the finale of the Pentagon research agency\u2019s AI air combat competition. The algorithm, developed by Heron Systems, easily defeated the fighter pilot in all five rounds that capped off a yearlong competition hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.<\/p>\n

The competition, called the AlphaDogfight Trials, was part of DARPA\u2019s Air Combat Evolution program, which is exploring automation in air-to-air combat and looking to improve human trust in AI systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy to go down the wrong path of thinking that that is either A) definitive in some way as to what the future of [basic fighter maneuvers will be]; or B) that it is a bad outcome,\u201d said Justin Mock of DARPA, a fighter pilot and commentator for the trials. \u201cFrom a human perspective, from the fighter pilot world, we talked about we trust what works. And what we saw was that in this limited area, in this specific scenario, we\u2019ve got AI that works.\u201d<\/p>\n

The human pilot, only known to the audience by his call sign \u201cBanger\u201d for operational security reasons, is a graduate of the Air Force\u2019s weapons instructor course, a highly selective training course reserved for top fighter pilots. While the victory for the AI system is a big step forward for the young DARPA program, the work is far from over.<\/p>\n

The conditions in the simulation weren\u2019t realistic for aerial combat. To start, the artificial intelligence system had perfect information, which experts commentating on the event noted never happens in the field. The human pilot was also flying a fake stick in a virtual seat.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot caveats and disclaimers to add in here,\u201d Col. Dan Javorsek, program manager in DARPA\u2019s Strategic Technology Office, said in a post-event livestream.<\/p>\n

Heron\u2019s AI system gained notoriety throughout the competition for its aggressiveness and the accuracy of its shot. Mock noted before the human-AI matchup that the AI system will \u201ctake shots that we would never take in our training environments.\u201d Mock also said Heron often made an error in basic fighter maneuvers by turning away from enemy aircraft to where the AI thought the other aircraft would go, but was able to recover throughout the fights because of Heron\u2019s \u201csuperior aiming ability\u201d and the competitor aircraft taking the bait.<\/p>\n

Heron was one of eight AI teams selected by DARPA to take part in the final round of the agency\u2019s competition. Heron topped the likes of Lockheed Martin, Perspecta Labs, Aurora Flight Sciences, EpiSys Science, Georgia Tech Research Institute, PhysicsAI and SoarTech.<\/p>\n

DARPA\u2019s leadership on the project acknowledged that the results of the simulated dogfight are just the first step in a long journey to fielding AI that can fight in air combat.<\/p>\n

\u201cArtificial intelligence shows a lot of promise. It\u2019s kind of been bang or bust in the past,\u201d Javorsek said. \u201cIn the larger ACE program, our plan is to take the modeling and simulation work that we\u2019re doing here and translate it from that digital environment into the real world. And it turns out that\u2019s a pretty important jump to make.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Air Combat by Algorithm Graham Warwick, Aviation Week, 31.8.2020 WASHINGTON \u2014 An artificial intelligence algorithm has defeated a human F-16 fighter pilot in a virtual dogfight simulation. The Aug. 20 event was the finale of the Pentagon research agency\u2019s AI<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":889,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":893,"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions\/893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luftverteidigung.ch\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}