AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

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6266
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by 6266 » Fri Sep 03, 2021 6:37 am

An awesome technology achievement is a dishwasher. I saved myself many hours not having to do this boring job by hand.

Condor is a game, better, it's a simulation to do something we like very well and can't do in RL for whatever reason.

If I think that's boring I can find a machine making this for me. Now we see that's possible using AI. But there is no necessary to use the simulation in contrast to the need to wash dishes. Using NI i can solve the problem by letting it be. Why using a computer to play a computer game? Because we don't have other problems in the world? Would be great.

I call this eDoping, and now it will exist in eSports the same fight between doping and anti doping as in RL. It's wasted energy. Call me paranoid, maybe - surely - I am, but I can't see anything in it I would really like.

These are my last words in this thread, it's not good for my blood pressure ...

Wish all a good time in the FAI GP, without eDoping
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alexvinckier
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by alexvinckier » Mon Sep 06, 2021 9:45 am

After reading a lot of commotion on this topic, I have some remarks.

My personal challenge was its development. This simulator is an excellent platform to experiment on and solve a myriad of problems.

It is not about eDoping or dishwashing issues. Just an engineering / software challenge.
And I have truly enjoyed it and i learned a great deal about the physics of flying, AI development and the human reaction towards new technologies.

Seeing some of the reactions, I start to understand why we here in Europe are always last in line for state of the art technologies. Instead of embracing, we throw a bucket load of irrelevant nonsense.

That does not mean that we have to accept cheating. I have been transparent of what and how i did it. So it cannot be regarded as cheating, as this requires to hide your deception from your competing colleagues. On the otherhand, where do you draw the line.

I will continue, no doubt about this. And hopefully my AI tool can be challenged in one of the competition, as long all competitors agree. Luckily, at the current level the AI autopilot will lose in the most epic manner.

To conclude, have some great reading on

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2021/09/sc ... stupidity/

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Bre901
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by Bre901 » Mon Sep 06, 2021 10:06 am

:lol:
We don't need no stinkin' artificial stupidity, the natural one is already thriving :roll:
CN: MPT — CondorUTill webpage: https://condorutill.fr/

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dgtfer
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by dgtfer » Mon Sep 06, 2021 10:32 am

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain?
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janjansen
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by janjansen » Mon Sep 06, 2021 11:36 pm

Alex,

Congratulations on a massive achievement. I absolutely LOVE that someone tried this and you did a heck of a lot more than just trying. Im extremely impressed with what you pulled off. Please, dont let the comments put you off. Its not because IBM beat world champions at chess and go and computer games, that we stopped enjoying chess or go or computer games.

I have seen and experimented a little with autopilots (ardupilot) on radio controlled planes; these days they even do some automatic thermaling (way worse than even a bad pilot, but its there). And for decades I have wondered, how would a computer fare against top glider pilots ? What would they come up when given the same (incomplete) information as a human, and what theoretically perfect route would they be able to calculate if you can give them complete information (of a virtual environment like condor). How much difference would there be? This fascinates me; how close to perfection do even the best pilots get, be it in condor or RL ?

In condor the two questions blend in a little, because it is more predictable than real life. If you could train an AI sufficiently, eventually it should be able to come close to perfection when given just the weather settings and topology. But without access to condor source code, you can probably only train it "real time", meaning it cant learn faster than humans playing condor. For those worried this approach will yield winning performance, have a look how an AI using reinforced learning teaches itself to park a car:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMp6pq6_QjI&

It needs 100s of 1000s of attempts to learn parking a car. Its a miracle Alex' AI manages to complete a task at all (well, also because Alex taught it some tricks rather than letting it figure everything out), but its not going to beat us, I dare say, ever as long as he cant use reinforced learning at 10s of 1000x normal speed.

But I am still curious about the theoretical best flight paths; if ever you are bored, I would love to see an AI flying a "sim" with a simplistic flight/meteo model, but doing 100s of 1000s of flights over a terrain and figuring out the best route.

Another thing Im curious about, and I, sure, you are too; if your AI can fly condor, can it fly IRL? You may want to test that with a radio controlled model plane first :).

KipperUK
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by KipperUK » Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:05 pm

This is impressive but people shouldn't worry. I don't see how a machine learning AI can beat a human pilot on a task it has never experienced before.

If you do 1000's of runs on the same task with the same weather seed then eventually, an AI would be able to work out the best routing to take it through the best air at the best speeds - so it could ruin 'non live' leaderboards; but it will pose no threat to a human competitor in a task it's never seen before - at best, it will get around at an average speed, or perhaps a little higher because it could be a little smoother on the control inputs and a little quicker to react - but since it won't be able to see anything up ahead that a human pilot can't, it has no other advantages.

roeoender
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by roeoender » Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:59 pm

janjansen wrote:
Mon Sep 06, 2021 11:36 pm
But without access to condor source code, you can probably only train it "real time", meaning it cant learn faster than humans playing condor.
Well Condor has to get it's "sense of passing time" by some OS API call, so I suppose you can either patch Windows API or more easly wine (Windows Emulator) or tweak some virtual machine to increase the reported time progress by some multiplier to make the simulation go faster. Of course standard disclaimers apply, HTH ;)

If Condor devs stepped into the eSport world then like-it-or-not they must take anti-cheating mechanism even more seriously, I think it is good to see what is possible at the beginning rather then had a long lasting cheating scandal that would be revealed after long time.

Making more complex, dynamic weather (weather fronts, large stratuses without lift, local showers, longer streeting) would also help as would require A.I. to really read from the clouds you actually see from cockpit and not just flying ridges and simple rounded Cu-s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad comes to my mind every time I see something like this, but for one I welcome our new A.I. pilot-overlords. ;)

Fingers
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by Fingers » Tue Sep 14, 2021 7:34 pm

roeoender wrote:
Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:59 pm
janjansen wrote:
Mon Sep 06, 2021 11:36 pm
But without access to condor source code, you can probably only train it "real time", meaning it cant learn faster than humans playing condor.
If Condor devs stepped into the eSport world then like-it-or-not they must take anti-cheating mechanism even more seriously, I think it is good to see what is possible at the beginning rather then had a long lasting cheating scandal that would be revealed after long time.
"Some" people will cheat, very sad, to win by cheating, is beyond me. But depressingly there are folks out there who think like this, and think its clever. Just because they can.

Where our AI friend is going with this, I don't know, but the fact he's publicly advertising it suggested more the use of study. But that can very quickly get in the hands of those who have different ideas.

As a yard stick, IRacing is even used by current F1 drivers racing competitively, a serious Esport simulator. But they have a robust and trusted anti cheat software running along side the service, constantly monitoring.

Not a clue how this could be implemented into Condor but maybe they need to think about it.

witor
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Re: AI Autopilot makes a 8000km 38hour flight possible

Post by witor » Thu Sep 23, 2021 3:46 pm

Fingers wrote:
Tue Sep 14, 2021 7:34 pm
Congratulations on a massive achievement
I second to that. Amazing achievement. I agree that there is a bit of a worry that this could be potentially used for cheating, but let's not forget it could also be used to improve everyone's skills. Yes engines are used in chess by cheaters, but engines are also responsible for possibly the biggest improvement of real chess players in the history of the game. Thanks to computers we know that strategies we though are very good for hundreds of years are not actually that great. I would find it very interesting to see by how much I would loose against perfectly flying AI and why did I lose. This would be an excellent learning tool.

With the world of AI developing at such a fast pace software like this was inevitable and there is nothing much we can do about it. It is just natural. When or if it will get good enough to compete with humans we will need to find the way to detect and eliminate cheaters, like it is done in other esport disciplines. How easy or difficult it is to detect and stop cheaters, that's another issue, but I hope it will be doable.

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