{"id":3411,"date":"2025-07-04T13:45:46","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T13:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/scientists-chatgpt-controls-spaceship\/"},"modified":"2025-07-04T13:45:46","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T13:45:46","slug":"scientists-chatgpt-controls-spaceship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/scientists-chatgpt-controls-spaceship\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocket Scientists Hooked Up ChatGPT to the Controls of a Spaceship, and the Results Were Not What You Might Expect"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1200\" height=\"630\" src=\"https:\/\/wordpress-assets.futurism.com\/2025\/07\/scientists-chatgpt-controls-spaceship.jpg\" class=\"attachment-full size-full wp-post-image\" alt=\"ChatGPT could perform surprisingly well when put in charge of navigating space inside a simulated spacecraft, researchers have found.\" style=\"margin-bottom: 15px;\" decoding=\"async\"><\/div>\n<h2>AI Kirk<\/h2>\n<p>Despite being <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/frontier-ai-models-stumped-childrens-game\">stumped by simple children&#8217;s games<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/openai-new-ai-problem-hallucinate-more\">uncontrollably hallucinating<\/a>, AI models could perform surprisingly well when put in charge of navigating space inside a simulated spacecraft, researchers have found.<\/p>\n<p>As <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/space\/space-exploration\/chatgpt-could-pilot-a-spacecraft-shockingly-well-early-tests-find\"><em>Live Science<\/em> reports<\/a>, a team of scientists from MIT and the Universidad Polit\u00e9cnica de Madrid, Spain, instructed OpenAI&#8217;s blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT to &#8220;operate as an autonomous agent controlling a pursuit spacecraft.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To their amazement, as detailed in <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2505.19896\">a paper<\/a> slated to be published in the <em>Journal of Advances in Space Research<\/em>, they found that the large language model exceeded expectations, scoring second place in a space simulation competition based on the popular video game Kerbal Space Program that pitted several AI agents against each other.<\/p>\n<h2>To Infinity and Beyond<\/h2>\n<p>To test how autonomous agents could be used to maneuver satellites and other space-based assets, researchers created a software design challenge called the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ll.mit.edu\/conferences-events\/2024\/01\/kerbal-space-program-differential-game-challenge\">Kerbal Space Program Differential Game Challenge<\/a>. Participants are encouraged to employ a number of different approaches, such as reinforcement learning.<\/p>\n<p>As part of the program, scientists pitted various autonomous systems against each other in several different scenarios.<\/p>\n<p>In the latest research, the team developed a way to translate instructions and queries about how to orient and maneuver a spacecraft into text and fed it to several commercially available LLMs. With only a small number of prompts, they found that ChatGPT, in particular, performed surprisingly well, coming in second place in the Game Challenge.\u00a0First place, in an important caveat, went to a system based on equations that model spaceflight.<\/p>\n<p>Best of all, the research was conducted before OpenAI released its GPT-4 model in March 2023, suggesting the latest iterations might perform even better.<\/p>\n<p>But there are still plenty of reasons why we should think twice before handing over the controls to the tech. For one, the current crop of AI models still <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-industry-problem-smarter-hallucinating\">suffers from rampant hallucinations<\/a>, which could make for an awkward \u2014 and particularly terrifying \u2014 twist in a deep space mission.<\/p>\n<p><strong>More on AI:<\/strong> <em><a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/tech-workers-ai-lay-offs\">Tech Workers Say They&#8217;re Rapidly Being Replaced by AI<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/scientists-chatgpt-controls-spaceship\">Rocket Scientists Hooked Up ChatGPT to the Controls of a Spaceship, and the Results Were Not What You Might Expect<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI Kirk Despite being stumped by simple children&#8217;s games and uncontrollably hallucinating, AI models could perform surprisingly well when put in charge of navigating space inside a simulated spacecraft, researchers&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,196,1453,179,2447],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-chatgpt","category-large-language-models","category-openai","category-spacecraft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}