A.I. Downs Expert Human Fighter Pilot in Dogfights
popsci.com
popsci.com
>When Geno took manual control of the blue aircraft against the reds controlled by the baseline controller AFRL had previously been utilizing, he could easily defeat it. However, even after repeated attempts against the more mature version of ALPHA, not only could he not score a kill against it, he was shot out of the air by the reds every time after protracted engagements.
That's pretty damning. They tied one electronic arm behind the AI's back and it was still able to down a veteran pilot.
IRL the AI aircraft would likely have substantially better performance than a manned aircraft, making the disparity even worse.
This all squares with what I've been hearing in recent years. There seems to be quite a bit of resistance to the idea of unmanned fighters in the upper ranks of the USAF, but the writing is on the wall. Been there for a long time now.
The paper is very vague on the technical details, unfortunately. This appears to be a largely hardcoded logic-based system with some genetic programming (rather than a machine learned system).