Caution to newbies and A.I.

Computers are not intelligent. Even AI's. What they are is blindingly fast, which makes them SEEM intelligent. A computer can compare a few million things in the time it takes an organic mind to consider one or two things.

Consider AB's example about a truss. An experienced human can think, hmm that doesn't look right...and then check and see if they can find out why it doesn't "look right".

the computer program looks at the same thing, checks against the specs it was given, and finds it ok. when it isn't, because the specs given the machine were off, but the machine doesn't consider that possibility, does it?
Can it??

The self driving trucks that crash into police cars and emergency vehicles are a case in point. Something in the programming tells the truck "pay attention to this" and the truck does, and drives right into it. The engineer's answer? "oh, that just a programming glitch, we'll fix that..." meanwhile, these things are on the road, and people ARE at risk.
 
AI is like artificial sweeteners. A poor substitute for the real thing, harmful if used in excess and leaves a bad aftertaste.

I’ve never used either for reloading.
 
If you are new to reloading, if you research information on Microsoft's "Bing" A.I. (or perhaps any such system), be sure to continue to research that supports what you are told.
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This goes for most information from online. If what you are doing is important, verify the results from multiple, unrelated sources that aren't self referencing or copied and pasted. I find a lot of information is nothing more than wholesale copy and paste of sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes virtually entire websites...meaning the information isn't new or from a different source, only a different location.

When working up loads, you can survey other reloaders and get multiple different answers. The bottom line here is that this isn't just an AI issue. It is an information validation issue.
 
Marco Califo said:
Burn rate charts are approximations and are not driven by actual specific data.
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This isn't always so. The 2013 Norma manual has a detailed description of how a relative burn rate chart is developed. A particular cartridge and bullet are selected (308 Win with 147-grain bullet in their case) and a known suitable charge of a known suitable powder is fired in a really beefy test gun capable of withstanding some pretty high pressure and the peak pressure is recorded to establish a reference point for comparison. Then the same charge weight is then loaded with all the other powders chosen for the list and fired in the beefy test gun. The powders are then ranked in reverse order of the peak pressure they produced. This is the order relative to the reference. In reality, peak pressure depends not only on burn rate but energy content and other factors, so the list is pretending as if burn rate was the only factor the pressure differences were caused by. It's a behaves-as-if chart.

This system has several limitations. One mentioned by Norma is that chosing a different cartridge or bullet can cause some powders to reverse order on the final table. Another is that the powders for the testing that aren't made by the company developing the chart (Bofors, in this case) are purchased off the shelf, with no way to know if the particular lot purchased is typical or on the high or low side of average burn rate. All this adds up to variability between charts that list powders in numerical order, rather than the style that clusters them by appropriate application. I always think the latter are more realistic from the standpoint of not letting the exact order deceive anybody and from the standpoint of getting around not knowing which numbers represent bigger or smaller jumps in pressure. However, I do wish they all would at least list their relative pressure percentages.

The Norma manual has the actual pressures and velocities produced for the particular chart they detailed. It is not comprehensive, as you can only go to powders just so fast before you need to transition to a pistol cartridge, causing a discontinuity.
 
I do have the 2013 Norma Reloading Manual, volume 2, Precision Reloading Guide for Professional Shooters. They have an interesting and calculatable method, and produced a burn rate chart, acknowledged to yield variations (e.g., changing calibers), that do not PROVE the conflicting results are right, or wrong. Such data do not support conclusions, nor specific load data. IMO we should never let that "idea" that AI will help anything in reloading, wriggle around. It is false.
My point was that their burn rate data cannot be extrapolated to determine a safe load.
Appling statistical analysis, and/or linking data (ignoring underlying assumptions, or the Norma quote I end with)) to x cannot ever give you y actual data. It is apples and oranges.
Someone, an airplane engineer, once "proved" mathematically that Bumble Bees cannot fly; yet they can and do (because they don't read and misapply statistics to fundamentally flawed data).
Specifically to NEW reloaders: AI offers nothing except exponentially increasing RISK the for life threatening dangerous data.
Use real published reloading data, period.
Quoting Norma, page 89 "Any such chart should be used only as an information guide. Always refer to published data."
 
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I am somewhat confused. When I think of AI, I think of the systems imagined in the old days of sci-fi, a program that was "intelligent" in the sense that it could learn and incorporate what it learned into its operations to perform them more effectively or efficiently.

It seems like what is being called AI here is just an extensive search engine, that "intelligently" decides what data it finds to present to you.

Does it, (Can it??) evaluate the data it sees for anything other than how well it answers your search criteria??

Seems to me that if that is what it does, its still a matter of human experience and judgement to determine if the data presented is both accurate, and meets the search parameters.
 
That's because human experience is what gives context to the question and answer alike.

That said, there seem to be a couple of kinds of AI floating around. I saw that some experimenters in one of the big software firms decided to try forming an Internet business, and the AI coded their app software for them to their specifications...in seven minutes. So all the people going to coding boot camp need to watch out. But you probably have to know how to talk to it to get that to happen.


Marco,

My only point is that the table's creation was driven by data (their pressure measurements). Not that loads can be directly deduced from the results. I agree that AI is a roll of the dice where data is concerned. At least with the chart, you know who published it. With AI you have no idea where it's information came from (other than, "it's on the Internet").
 
Just to emphasize how I started this post so no one misses it:

"Caution to newbies and A.I.
If you are new to reloading, if you research information on Microsoft's "Bing" A.I. (or perhaps any such system), be sure to continue to research that supports what you are told."

Since I am more than a neophyte in this hobby, I poised the question just for the hell of it to see what AI had to offer in this "advanced" encyclopedic collection of intellectual information, precisely because I had encountered errors in medical issues.

I would hope no one entertained the opinion that I somehow suggested it was a suitable source of information.
 
Burn Rate Tables and AI

It seems the AI is unaware that burn-rate tables are composed by each manufacturer using their own testing protocol.

There is no industry standard for compiling a burn rate table (i.e. do you burn the powder in the open versus a confined space, etc.?), so any AI assuming the burn rates are comparable are wrong.
 
Actually, there does seem to be an industry-standard method based on firing the same charge weight of all the powders being ranked in the same cartridge with the same bullet up to a speed point. But there is no standard for which cartridge or bullet is to be used nor for where a handoff to a different cartridge and bullet for the faster powders occurs. The ranking differs a little in a different cartridge with a different bullet weight. The relative burn rate ranking is then simply the inverse of the pressure peaks of each powder produced.

They have to do something like that because the relative burn rate is an "as-if" number and not an actual burn rate number. The reason the actual burn rate (the burn rate factor, Ba) doesn't give useful enough information to the shooter is that different powder formulations have different total chemical energy content and different progressivity rates, so the pressure curves don't match and the peak values don't depend in a simple manner on the burn rate alone.

There is a thorough description of an example of a relative burn rate chart developed by Bofors in the 2013 Norma print manual.
 
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