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China’s ‘AI Ship Designer’ Works At Unprecedented Speed; Performed A Year’s Work Only In 24 Hours!

A team of Chinese researchers funded by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recently claimed to have used artificial intelligence (AI) to design an electrical layout of a warship with 100 percent accuracy and at an unprecedented speed.

A team of researchers from the China Ship Design and Research Center, headed by Luo Wei, a senior engineer with the ship design center, published a paper in the Chinese-language journal Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems on February 27.

The researchers claimed in the paper that their AI designer took only a day to complete work that humans would need nearly a year to achieve with the most advanced computer tools.

Considering the scale and complexity of modern warships, mistakes are sure to happen during the design process, and it can take several hours to discover and rectify them. However, when the researchers put the AI designer to the test, with more than 400 challenging tasks, they found that the AI could accomplish 100 percent accuracy.

According to the researchers, while there is still room for improvement, their AI designer was “ready for engineering applications” in China’s shipbuilding industry to increase the rate of warship manufacturing.




David Wang on Twitter: "Liaoning carrier battle group completed the combat training in west pacific waters and returned to Tsingtao. Note the last pic? https://t.co/eXaYGFbqWr" / Twitter
Liaoning Carrier Battle Group in West Pacific waters (via Twitter)

Luo’s team said that the Chinese military funded their AI designer project because the design process was the main area hindering the speed of production of warships rather than shipyard delays.

Chinese AI Compared To That Of Google

Luo’s team compared their AI designer to those developed by companies like Google to increase the speed of computer chip design. There were some critical differences between the two, according to the team.

Firstly, the team notes in the paper that there is no room for error in warship design, and the AI chip designer can make a few mistakes.

Furthermore, the team said that while an AI chip designer could produce many products, computing resources could be assigned to train it, and the company could still realize a profit margin.




Image for Representation (via Twitter)

Whereas their AI warship designer was only working on one vessel without the resources of a Big Tech company.

Also, unlike an AI system that learns and makes decisions independently without human intervention, the warship designer created by the team is a machine that operates with human guidance.

The AI designer starts by consulting a database of Chinese ship design knowledge and experience from past decades, and then it comes up with a design, which it checks against the database. According to Luo’s team, this approach significantly reduced the computing resources needed and eliminated errors.

The team also noted that the AI designer’s effectiveness had only been proven for the layout of electrical systems. However, it also carried out these design tasks much faster and more accurately than humans, and it could be used easily with a small computer system.

“Other countries may have developed similar systems, but they have not disclosed them publicly due to the military sensitivity,” the team added.

China Could Surpass The US

China already boasts the world’s largest navy numerically after overtaking the US Navy between 2015 and 2020. If the recent claims by Luo’s team are anything to go by, the US military planners have much to fear.

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