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A comment on AI fighter pilot wins in combat simulation. Parent comment

Re:AI fighter pilot wins in combat simulation by empath75 on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:04PM (#11997074)
Seems to me this gets a lot more interesting when they start building fighter jets without the assumption that a pilot will be in the plane at all. You can build much smaller, lighter planes without the need for life support systems or worrying about g-forces that will kill a human pilot.

I'll grant you that doing this in the US is going to be problematic because of ethical concerns, but there is definitely going to be some country that does it, and as soon as they do, they'll instantly gain air supremacy.

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Re:AI fighter pilot wins in combat simulation by niftich on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:09PM (#11997114)
Aren't those called missiles or UAVs?

As in, we should consider why we have planes in the first place: it's to deliver some payload (bombs, missiles, or in the olden days, cameras for photography) to a specific place where you make use of that payload and then go home. Once you remove the human, you're not left with too many uses that can't be solved with existing technology.

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Re:AI fighter pilot wins in combat simulation by swsh on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @11:14PM (#11999271)
The HiMAT basically demonstrated this. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much information online about the program, however some books I've read note that the program was a success.

http://www.boeing.com/history/products/himat-research-vehicl...

Rudimentary fuzzy logic in this kind of platform should be able to defeat a human pilot regardless of the pilots cunning/unpredictability/other human aspects which movies trump as superior human features. But, practical requirements such as range, payload, loiter time, pork barrelling may mean that the platform is otherwise compromised.

Additionally in an era where things such as airborne lasers are becoming a reality, the whole meta may completely change.

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Re:AI fighter pilot wins in combat simulation by alkonaut on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:20PM (#11997189)
The life-support weight and g-force worrying can be dropped, but I think parameters like wing-loading, range, load capacity, the radar and its power generation will set the size of a fighter plane to be pretty much that of a fighter, even if you drop the pilot.
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