Loon's balloons are about to get an AI master

Google's giant white Internet-delivering balloons have been floating through the skies for several years now. And because they've been collecting data on how best to pilot them all the while, the company has now decided to let artificial intelligence take control. Wired reports that the engineering team behind Google's Project Loon is going to move away from using control algorithms that are hard-coded, and instead use machine learning to understand how best to stick to a desired flight path. Navigating a balloon through the stratosphere autonomously is a very different task from getting a car to drive through a city by itself. For starters, there's only one way to control the balloons: pump a little extra air in or out in order to have the balloon rise or fall. But an AI system can keep analyzing new data to improve how to react to conditions in a way that a hard-coded algorithm can't, comparing the actual flightpath to the intended one for a given decision.