Is this an announcement of another online get-together? Not even. If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool airplane geek, you’ll want to join this conference where teams developing artificial intelligence dogfighting technologies will face off against an actual F-16 fighter pilot in the virtual world.
It’s the final stage of a contest put on by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and broadcast live from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Eight teams will pit their Artificial Intelligence-driven aircraft designs against each other in a three day competition, and the top finalist will square off against an F-16 pilot in a simulator dogfight to see if the adaptive intelligence programed into the design can take on one of the world’s best-trained fighter pilots.
While the showdown won’t be as dramatic as John Henry with his hammer in hand versus the steam drill, it will be an educational look into how unmanned AI designs may soon be clearing the skies of enemy threats. The DARPA AlphaDogfight Trials, scheduled for August 28-20, 2020, is the third and final event in a series that brought eight teams together to design AI technologies that could replace the human element in a dogfight.
This event will lay the groundwork for the DARPA Air Combat Evolution, a program which will advance beyond simulations to implement AI into scale aircraft before advancing on to full-scale testing.
American citizens can register for the ZoomGov Webinar via this link through August 17; non-Citizen deadline is August 11 (sorry, we just found out!).
