I recently read that Google’s DeepMind Artificial Intelligence (AI) project was able to beat a professional player at Go and I wonder how AI might be applied in the future to Procedure Design. We all know how complex it can be to design a IF procedure with all the rules and guidelines within ICAO Doc. 8168 or FAA TERPS criteria.
For me, a defining point was when Garry Kasparov lost a game of chess to a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue developed by IBM. This happened in 1996 and interestingly Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million positions per second. An Intel Core 2 Duo CPU can handle about 4 millions positions per second and you may have this or a slightly newer CPU in your computer now.
This Google announcement is interesting as the rules of Go are simpler to that of chess but I understand that a player has a choice of 200 moves compared with about 20 in chess.
Perhaps one day AI techniques can be applied to design a procedure from start to end, at ASD we are investigating options all the time and we have found some technologies to that allow high performance computing at reasonable prices. But for now, the toolkit approach with semi automation is the way ahead.