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An F-16 Fighting Falcon and an F-14 Tomcat engaged in a mock dogfight
as part of U.S. Navy TOPGUN training

TOPGUN, the Navy's program teaching tactics to the best fighter pilots, may go the way of horse-driven wagons if the most recent blurb about AI pilot success against human pilots proves to be true.

According to a report from The South China Morning Post, Chinese military researchers have claimed that, for the first time, an AI-powered fighter pilot has bested humans in a real-life, close-range dogfight, winning the contest in an astonishingly short 90 seconds.

"With superior calculation ability," the researchers write in their study, as quoted by the SCMP, "[the AI] can more accurately predict the development of the battle to gain the initiative in the confrontation."

"The era of air combat in which artificial intelligence will be the king," they add, "is already on the horizon."

China’s AI-controlled aircraft (in the red circle) defeated another aircraft remotely-controlled by a human pilot in close-range air combat.
Image: China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre, Mianyang

The artificial intelligence machine showed superior performance in cutting-edge close-range fighting and kept the human opponent a constant underdog, according to a new paper.

It was published a month after the United States military said an AI pilot had recently conducted numerous test missions, including combat drills, on a real F-16 fighter.

In closing ...

That the AI does not have the same limitations as the human body, such as the effects of excess gravitational pull, also played in its favor.

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