PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Computers need to know what they are doing
Old 8th Sep 2016, 10:47
  #92 (permalink)  
Uplinker
 
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: UK
Posts: 2,508
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Oh for goodness' sake.

Look, chess is a very strictly defined. A chess board has just 64 squares OK ? Each square can only have one piece on it. Each piece only has certain defined moves available. To win a chess game, one only needs to be able to work through every possible move you can make WITHIN those 64 squares, and the moves the opponent can make in response. Grand masters can do this to an extraordinary degree, but it is something that is very well suited to a computer, because a computer has the memory available to work through every possible move on the board and log it, score it and then make the best move according to its programmed algorithms. Chess is also not life and death.

Now, imagine you are making an approach to a runway at night. It is raining and turbulent with scattered cloud. An aircraft ahead of you has just been cleared to take off. Your aircraft is bucking around and you have the windshield wipers on. You fly through occasional clumps of cloud in which you get a brief white-out effect from your landing lights. ATC has brought you quite close in to the aircraft that has just been cleared. You have heard the aircraft acknowledge his take-off clearance. In these conditions, you can only really see the runway edge and centre lighting. You cannot see the aircraft on the runway, but you can just make out his strobes and infer where he is when he blocks out a runway light. He seems to be moving very slowly and is just lining up.

You have to make a decision according to the acceleration of the aircraft taking off whether to execute a missed approach, or whether to keep going.

Question: How do you propose to engineer and program the level of real time visual processing required to make sense of what your "thinking ahead" computer is even looking at - let alone be able to make any sort of decision about it?

All you can see is a blackness with myriad of lights ahead of you. The human pilot knows that those lights are the runway, those lights are the road nearby, those tiny lights are the aircraft on the runway, and the human brain can track that aircraft by observing where he is according to which runway lights he is blocking out. As well as this, the scene is moving around all the time due to the turbulence. The scene completely disappears now and then - replaced with just random whiteness as we fly through each cloud. The rain and the windshield wipers constantly distort and block parts of the scene. The human brain can assimilate all of this and process it into a three dimensional moving predictive situational awareness. Can any computer see this well?

Stop bloody trolling will you?
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