from the meat-puppets-are-obsolete dept.
El Reg reports [theregister.co.uk]
Today's generation of fighter pilots could be the last of their breed, thanks to an [Artificial Intelligence] system dubbed ALPHA that's proving unkillable in air combat.
The US Air Force has just completed dogfighting trials in a simulator, pitching the software against retired Air Force Colonel Gene Lee. The AI--which ran on a $35 Raspberry Pi computer--was deliberately handicapped but still managed to shoot down its fleshy opponent every time and evade his attempts to kill it.
[...]To make the defeat even more humiliating, the ALPHA AI's fighters were deliberately handicapped with shorter-range missiles and fewer of them, and its opponents got additional intelligence from a simulated AWACS radar aircraft.
[...]The key to the software is the use of a "Genetic Fuzzy Tree" algorithm [omicsgroup.org][PDF], which breaks down complex decisions into simpler if/then scenarios and narrows down the possible choices very quickly. The code then works through its plans 250 times faster than a human can blink.