经济学人下载:空战--虚拟小牛(2)

Though dogfighting practice, like parade-ground drill and military bands, is a leftover from an earlier form of warfare that still serves a residual purpose, the next phase of DARPA's ACE(AIr combat evolution) project belongs firmly in the future, for it will require the piloting programs to control two planes simultaneously. Also, these virtual aircraft will be armed with short-range missiles rather than guns. That increases the risk of accidental fratricide, for a missile dispatched towards the wrong target will pursue it relentlessly. Tests after that will get more realistic still, with longer-range missiles, the use of chaff and flares, and a requirement to deal with corrupt data and time lags of a sort typical of real radar information. 

尽管空战像阅兵式地面演练和军乐队那样是旧战争的残留物，但它仍有其残存的作用。未来DARPA的“空战进化(ACE)”项目将要进入下一阶段，届时会要求飞行员同时控制两架飞机。此外，这些虚拟飞机将配备短程导弹而不是枪炮，这增加了意外发生自相残杀的风险，因为朝错误目标发射的导弹会无情地追击敌人。之后的测试还将更加真实，包括远程导弹、箔条和信号弹的使用以及处理一种真实雷达信息典型的数据破坏和时间滞后的要求。

The point of all this, putative Top Guns should be reassured, is not so much to dispense with ilots as to help them by "a redistribution of cognitive workload within the cockpit", as Colonel Javorsek puts it. In theory, taking the pilot out of the plane lets it manoeuvre without regard for the impact of high g-forces on squishy humans. An uncrewed plane is also easier to treat as cannon-fodder. Still, most designs for new fighter jets have not done away with cockpits. For example, both of the rival European programmes—the British-led Tempest and the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS)—are currently "optionally manned". There are several reasons for this, explains Nick Colosimo, a lead engineer at BAE Systems, Tempest's chief contractor. 

那些“空中英豪们”应该放下心来，因为正如亚沃尔塞克上校所说，所有这一切的意义并不在于撤掉飞行员，而在于通过“重新分配驾驶舱内的认知负荷”来为他们提供帮助。理论上说，让飞行员离开飞机就是在无需考虑高重力对软绵绵的人体的影响的情况下来操纵飞机。一架无人飞机也更容易被当作炮灰。尽管如此，大多新型战斗机的设计里并没有去掉驾驶舱。例如，欧洲的两个竞争项目——英国主导的“害虫”和法国-德国-西班牙的未来作战空中系统(FCAS)——目前都是“可选载人”的。对此有几点原因，“害虫”的总承包商、BAE系统的首席工程师尼克·科洛西莫解释说。

One is that eliminating the pilot does not provide much of a saving. The cockpit plus the assorted systems needed to keep a human being alive and happy at high altitude—cabin pressure, for example—contribute only 1-2% of a plane's weight. A second is that even AI systems of great virtuosity have shortcomings. They tend not to be able to convey how they came to a decision, which makes it harder to understand why they made a mistake. They are also narrowly trained for specific applications and thus fail badly when outside the limits of that training or in response to "spoofing" by adversaries. 

第一点是撤掉飞行员节省不了多少钱。在高海拔环境下(比如机舱压力)，驾驶员座舱和各种系统只占飞机重量的1-2%。第二点，即便是技术精湛的人工智能系统也有缺点。他们通常无法表达自己是如何做出决定的，这使得人们更难理解他们犯错的原因。它们还为特定的应用进行了严格的训练，所以当情况超出了训练的范围或者应对敌方的“诈术”时，它们会败得很惨。

An example of this inflexibility is that, at one point in the AlphaDogfight trials, the organisers threw in a cruise missile to see what would happen. Cruise missiles follow preordained flight paths, so behave more simply than piloted jets. The AI pilots struggled with this because, paradoxically, they had beaten the missile in an earlier round and were now trained for more demanding threats. "A human pilot would have had no problem," observes Chris DeMay, who runs the APL's part of ACE. "AI is only as smart as the training you give it." 

这种僵化的一个例子是，在“阿尔法空战”的庭审中，组织者曾投了一枚巡航导弹看看会发生什么。巡航导弹遵循预定的飞行路线，表现得比人工驾驶飞机更为简单。而这种情况对人工智能飞行员来说会很棘手，因为它们在之前的回合中已经击败了导弹，现在它们被训练应对的是更为严峻的威胁，这很矛盾。“人类飞行员不会有任何问题，”负责空战进化(ACE)项目APL部分的克里斯·戴梅说。“人工智能的聪明程度取决于你给它的训练。”