real battlebots
There’s been a lot of attention focused on trading battlebots recently. It’s important to keep in mind that this is part of a long-standing, broad and arguably inexorable trend that is now spreading rapidly away from its successful base in industrial manufacturing to every other conceivable field from scheduling and logistics, to CAD and on to more aggressive pursuits like trading and battlefield operations. Perhaps looking at the state of the art in related fields can inform us about the direction of our algo bots.
This article in Foreign Policy illustrates an area where automation is making great strides into historically human undertakings. The use of so-called drone aircraft for recon and tactical missile strikes has reached a remarkable milestone: this year, the US Air Force will train more “pilots” for unmanned aircraft than for real fighters or bombers. Evidently there’s good reason for this change:
By 2013, software and communications improvements will allow the Air Force’s unmanned-aircraft pilots to simultaneously fly three drones at one time, and four in an emergency. Another factor supporting the likely proliferation of drones such as the Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk is their low cost compared with new manned aircraft such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
According to the Government Accountability Office, $24.5 million will purchase a set of four MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer drones plus a ground station and satellite relay. (See page 117 of this report.) The latest guess of the price for a single F-35 fighter-bomber is $100 million. (See page 93.) This gap in cost led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to demand the cancellation of the manned F-22 Raptor program in order to fund the purchase of more drones for service in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, for the price of one F-35, I can get a 16-strong phalanx of drones and the required ground-based support to deploy them. For the price of one F-22, I could get over 20. Sounds like a deal. But, they’re not really interchangeable parts as the F-35 or Raptor and other fighter-bombers can overcome “air defense threats” while the drones aren’t quite there yet. Thus, they’re really only good against opponents that don’t have an air force or anti-aircraft capabilities. In schoolyard parlance: they’re only good for defenseless opposition. But we’re buying lots of them, so we must have found nails for our hammer.
While developmentally they are likely in different places, there’s probably an analogy to be made between the current state of development between military drones and their algo trading equivalents.
If today’s algos are like today’s drones in that they’re relatively dumb and can’t overcome defensive threats, what might tomorrow’s algos look like? Who will they be able to target that they can’t currently?
