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From: HDavis.pa@XEROX.COM (Harley Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Does AI Kill?
Message-ID: <19880720043027.5.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 20 Jul 88 04:30:00 GMT
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Date: Tue, 19 Jul 88 12:34 EDT
Sender: hdavis.pa@Xerox.COM
From: Harley Davis <HDavis.pa@Xerox.COM>
Subject: Does AI Kill?
In-reply-to: AIList Moderator Nick Papadakis <AIList-REQUEST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>'s
 message of Mon, 18 Jul 88 00:20 EDT
To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU

I used to work as the artificial intelligence community of the Radar Systems
Division at Raytheon Co, the primary contractors for the Aegis detection radar.
(Yes, that's correct - I was the only one in the community.)  Unless the use of
AI in Aegis was kept extremely classified from everyone there, it did not use
any of the techniques we would normally call AI, including rule-based expert
systems.  However, it probably used statistical/Bayesian techniques to interpret
and correlate the data from the transponder, the direct signals, etc. to come up
with a friend/foe analysis.   This analysis is simplified by the fact that our
own jets give off special transponder signals.

But I don't think this changes the nature of the question - if anything, it's
even more horrifying that our military decision makers rely on programs ~even
less~ sophisticated than the most primitive AI systems.

-- Harley Davis
   HDavis.PA@Xerox.Com