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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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This article didn't mention it but the AI pilot did win at least one of the engagements during this testing run.
Not that that isn't interesting, but I'd jump in and insert a major caution here.
I don't know what is being done here, but a lot of the time, wargaming and/or military exercises are presented in the media as being an evaluation of which side/equipment/country is better in a "who would win" evaluation.
I've seen several prominent folks familiar with these warn about misinterpreting these, and I'd echo that now.
That is often not the purpose of actual exercises or wargames. They may be used to test various theories, and may place highly unlikely constraints on one side that favor it or the other.
So if someone says "the US fought China in a series of wargames in the Taiwan Strait and the US/China won in N wargames", that may or may not be because the wargame planners were trying to find out who is likely to win an actual war, and may or may not have much to to with the expectations the planners have of a win in a typical scenario. They might be trying to find out what would happen in a particular scenario that they are working on and how to plan for that scenario. They may have structured things in a way that are not representative of what they expect to likely come up.
To pull up an example, here's a fleet exercise that the US ran against a simulated German fleet between World War I and II:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_problem
That may be a perfectly reasonable way of identifying potential weaknesses in Panama Canal transit, but the planners may not have been aiming for the overall goal of evaluating whether, in the interwar period, Germany or the US would likely win in an overall war. Saying that the Black Fleet defeated the Blue Fleet in terms of the rules of the exercise doesn't mean that Germany would necessarily win an overall war; evaluating that isn't the purpose of the exercise. If, afterwards, an article says "US wargames show that interwar Germany would most likely defeat the US in a war", that may not be very accurate.
For the case OP is seeing, it may not even be the case that the exercise planners expect it to be likely for two warplanes to get within dogfighting range. We also do not know what, if any, constraints were placed on either side.