Fighter aircraft will soon get AI pilots

But they will be wingmen, not captains


  • by
  • 11 19, 2020
  • in Science and technology

CLASSIC DOGFIGHTSFDARPAAI, in which two pilots match wits and machines to shoot down their opponent with well-aimed gunfire, are a thing of the past. Guided missiles have seen to that, and the last recorded instance of such duelling was 32 years ago, near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, when an Iranian -4 Phantom took out an Iraqi Su-22 with its 20mm cannon.But memory lingers, and dogfighting, even of the simulated sort in which the laws of physics are substituted by equations running inside a computer, is reckoned a good test of the aptitude of a pilot in training. And that is also true when the pilot in question is, itself, a computer program. So, when America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (), an adventurous arm of the Pentagon, considered the future of air-to-air combat and the role of artificial intelligence () within that future, it began with basics that Manfred von Richthofen himself might have approved of.

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