RE: [FT] Unpredictable AI

<SNIP>
It is not that the AI is predictable, it is that it is mindnumbingly
stupid and the problems faced by pilots maintaining situational
awareness
while dodging fire is not solved merely by being really fast.  Unlike
playing chess or diagnosing engine problems, most of a pilot's skill set
are psycho-motor skills which can be learned, but not taught.  Humans
are
also much harder to fool than computers
<SNIP>

On the other hand, people can be easily fooled without experience.  The
common examples are basketball, hockey and soccer.  In these sports,
novices
often make the mistake of watching the opponent's eyes, not their center
of
mass (hips).  In these cases, a feint by looking sideways or a slight
movement with the arms can send an opponent off in the wrong direction.
More experienced players are not phased by these maneuvers because they
have
learned where the "true" indicator lies.  But in an evolving
environment,
your experience or instinct may be wrong as things change.  What may be
a
true indicator today could be used as a false indicator tomorrow.  

Computer intelligences would have a tremendous advantage in that new
information or techniques would be applied quickly, if not instantly
across
all the units a la Bolos (Keith Laumer) making innovations in tactics,
equipment etc much less valuable, maybe even one-shot affairs for
surprise
or advantage.  Humans take quite a while to train properly, artificial
intelligences could be plug and play.

On your point of situational awareness, the human mind has difficulty in
processing more than one data stream at a time.  It can be done but
takes
practice and focus.  AI's on the other hand are not limited in this way.
You can have separate modules that watch for lock-ons and activate the
appropriate counter-measures, a module that watches the range to target,
monitors the weapon status and makes sure the ordinance is delivered
without
having to distract the higher AI.  Instead of thinking of single crew
fighter, it would be like having 10 highly co-ordinated people working
inside a single cockpit.  

Humans are evolved to deal with human scale events - things that happen
in
the range of seconds or even tenths of a second.  Making decisions in
the
nano-, micro, or millisecond range are completely out of our abilities.
Biologically we aren't capable of reacting faster than a few hundred
milliseconds (i.e. the drop test where you drop a yardstick between
someone's fingers, even the fastest reflexes allow a drop of several
inches)
and your thought processes are based on a complex set of electrical and
chemical impulses, some neurotransmitters actually have to travel across
a
gap between neurons.  Although fast, these speeds pale in comparison to
pure
electrical or photonic speeds.

In returning to the thought that humans are much harder to fool than
computers, I would argue that is merely a matter of experience and
knowledge
base.  If you show half a picture that has a trunk on it, most people
would
say it was an elephant.  If you show the same picture to a someone who
has
never seen an elephant, what would they say?  They would try to relate
it to
something that was in their experience.  If a computer had a photo
database
of millions of pictures, then broke down the picture into shapes and
colors
it might also come up with elephant ( it would probably also say tree,
hose,
or worm).  The point is that given a sufficient database and enough
computing power the computer can come to the same result as a human.
Computers are going to get radically better in the future, humans are
not.

Personally, I prefer the idea of having human pilots because it is much
more
romantic and fulfilling thought not because it's practical.