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Breeding Race Cars With Genetic Algorithms
smack-pot writes "Wired News has an article about how the Digital Biology Interest Group at University College, London is using genetic algorithms to breed superfast Formula-One race cars. 68 design parameters were configurable in the cars, and the generated designs were tested using the racing simulation software developed by the game developer Electronic Arts. According to the research it is possible to shave off 88/100th of a second per lap by using genetic algorithms to tune the cars. In an industry where a tiny fraction of a second matters, that's significant."
I did some research and programming in this field over a decade ago. The really frustrating thing about this field is how slow moving it is and how little it is taken seriously.
When you have constructed an environment and electronic "organisms" that can breed within that environment, and then watched the generations gradually improve and adapt to the environment, you get the feeling of a new kind of power that we haven't really tapped yet - evolution.
I think one of the problems is that people don't get what is happening in these types of projects. When I showed people the projects I was working on - even biologists and computer scientists - the first reaction was that what they were seeing was just a simulation - i.e. that I had programmed in the fact that the organisms adapted to the environment. It took a lot of explaining to convince some people that what they were seeing was actual evolution, albeit in digital form.
The fact that this research is just looking at breeding cars which are used in a computer game just demonstrates how slow moving developments in this area are. Evolution could be used to improve many aspects of cars -- their engineering, efficiency, production and even visual design. It will happen one day, but it's taking us a hell of a time to realise that we can exploit the force that produced all the wonderful things we see in nature.
- 0.88 seconds is not well within the margin of error that the human drivers would introduce.
- If you would put all 20 current f1 drivers in exactly the same car, 15 of them would qualify within 0.5 of a second.
- 0.88 seconds advantage every 73 laps (Indianapolis) would accumulate to 64,24 seconds (almost a lap).
Foremost from my amateur racer point of view is the cost: Being able to tune any one of 60 some-odd parameters probably means being able to swap out any one of 60 some-odd parts with some other part, so you've got to have one of every possible part on hand or be able to fabricate it.
For an F1 team, cost's not so much a consideration, though, the trouble is time. To be able to change that many parameters means having someone get under the car, swap a pile of parts, and send the test driver back out on track to collect the info for the next evolution. Computer simulations are neat, but they're not perfect, and when you're talking about shaving fractions of a second, that small imperfection can throw it completely away.
I also wonder if this would actually be useful in the real world with real conditions. The sun going behind a cloud for a while has a measurable effect on lap times. The amount of gas in the tank, the temperature of the track, all those things change the way a car handles on the edge. Often, race setup is to dial in a car to be a little tighter or looser than what you really wanted because you expect the track to come to you.
And then there's a possibly even bigger problem: If you go out and look at two cars that are running identical lap times, chances are they're nothing even close to identically set up, because drivers aren't machines. One driver will like a certain setup, and another won't be able to do anything with it.