--- title: "AI Fighter Jet Obliterates Human Air Force Pilot in Simulated Dogfight" description: "AlphaDogfight An AI-controlled virtual fighter jet just beat a human pilot in a dogfight. The win came about during the finale of the US military’s AlphaDogfight challenge put on by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), where big-name military contractors like Lockheed Martin competed for the crown. The company behind the winning AI Heron […]" date: "2020-08-21" modified: "2020-08-21" authors: - name: "Victor Tangermann" job_title: "Senior Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-fighter-jet-obliterates-human" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "ai" - "air force" - "artificial intelligence" - "DARPA" - "fighter jet" - "the digest" --- # AI Fighter Jet Obliterates Human Air Force Pilot in Simulated Dogfight ![An AI-controlled virtual fighter jet just beat a human pilot in a dogfight, winning five rounds to zero as part of a DARPA contest.]() *\Image: DARPA\* ## AlphaDogfight An AI-controlled virtual fighter jet just beat a human pilot in a dogfight. The win came about during the finale of the US military's [AlphaDogfight challenge](), put on by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), in which big-name military contractors including Lockheed Martin competed for the crown. The winning company, Heron Systems, emerged as a victor with its fighter jet AI by defeating a human fighter pilot — call-sign "Banger" — who was sitting inside a simulator wearing a VR headset five rounds to zero, as [*Defense One* reports](). ## A Turning Point To some, the win signifies a turning point in what machine learning systems are capable of in the battlefield. "There is a nobility to the human role, but it symbolically points to a future of more and more machines in more and more roles," P.W. Singer, an analyst at the New America Foundation in Washington, [told *The Daily Beast*](). ## You Get Knocked Down The teams had to start from the ground up to teach their AIs how to fly a fighter jet. "You don’t have to teach a human \[that\] it shouldn’t crash into the ground… They have basic instincts that the algorithm doesn’t have," Lee Ritholtz, director and chief architect of AI, from Lockheed Martin told *Defense One*. "That means dying a lot. Hitting the ground, a lot." For Lockheed Martin, it took several servers running trial-and-error dogfights around the clock to come up with its final AI, a piece of software capable of being run on a single graphics card. The winning team's AI had been through more than 4 billion simulations, or about 12 years of flight time, as Ben Bell, senior machine learning engineer at Heron Systems, told *Defense One*. **READ MORE:** [Inside the Finale of DARPAH's Simulated Drone Dogfights]() \[*The Daily Beast*\] **More on the contest:** *[DARPA Is Testing F-16s Flown by AI in Virtual Combat]()* ## Author I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()