DARPA AlphaDogfight

The DARPA AlphaDogfight was a 2019–2020 DARPA program that pitted computers using F-16 flight simulators against one another. The computers were managed by eight teams of humans, who competed in a single-round elimination for the right to battle a skilled human dogfighter. Heron Systems corporation wrote a deep reinforcement learning software tool that bested the human pilot by a score of 5–0.^[1] The tournament program was managed by the Applied Physics Laboratory.^[2] The trials took place in October 2019 and January 2020 while the finals were held in August 2020.^[2][3] In 2024 a successor version of the program was tested with in the physical world with the X-62A.^[4]

Dogfight between 2 F-16s in simulation software; the pilots in this case are AI programs who are fighting for the chance to engage with a human pilot. The trajectories of the aircraft are denoted in pink and blue, as are the scores of the engagements.