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Comment by linschn | Hacker News Reader

I see how it can sound appealing to a bureaucrat, but as a programmer, debugging the concurrent evaluation of thousands of "natural" language IF...THEN... rules until I find the questionable one where a threshold was defined too low or too high sounds like a nightmare.

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Rule-based systems have had for a long time the ability to automatically answer queries about why was such or such decision taken.

That would indeed be a nightmare, but trying to debug a machine-generated neural network is actually worse.

I imagine they would log all the inputs, as well as branches taken so they can later replay everything in a debugger. That would make the process much simpler.

Being able to take the blackbox recordings of your combat drone which got shot down, reconstruct the scenario and permute the rules till you get a win, seems like...well, a big win.

Air combat is also one of those areas which does notionally have narrowly computable victory parameters - given hardware of capabilities X, there is a model we don't know which should generally predict the outcome.

Only if you do it wrong?

If it ends up like thousands upon thousands of if statements then you got it wrong (or so I think).

Getting it right IMO means realizing that rules are not necessarily source code but often data to be iterated over, filtered etc.

This is a form of metaprogramming that can be practiced even in Java ;-)

At least you can actually debug it.

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