Fighter aircraft will soon get AI pilots
But they will be wingmen, not captains
CLASSIC DOGFIGHTS, 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 F-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 (DARPA), an adventurous arm of the Pentagon, considered the future of air-to-air combat and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) within that future, it began with basics that Manfred von Richthofen himself might have approved of.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Virtual mavericks"
More from Science and technology
It is dangerously easy to hack the world’s phones
A system at the heart of global telecommunications is woefully insecure
The Great Barrier Reef is seeing unprecedented coral bleaching
Continued global warming will mean its obliteration
Some corals are better at handling the heat
Scientists are helping them breed