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Another Step Towards the Driverless Car
jtogel writes "At Essex, we have for some time been working on automatically learning how to race cars in simulation. It turns out that a combination of evolutionary algorithms and neural networks can learn how to beat all humans in racing games, and also come up with some quite interesting, novel behaviours, which might one day make their way into commercial racing games. While this is simulation, the race is now on for the real thing — we are setting up a competition for AI developers, where the goal is to win a race between model cars on real tracks. As the cars will be around half a meter long, the cost of participating will be a fraction of that for the famous DARPA Grand Challenge, whereas the challenges will be similar in terms of computer vision and AI."
If anyone actually is interested in reading the papers discussing the experiments we did (many more than you see in the videos!), most of them are available on my website.
Some of them are of course better than others. I can recommend this one, about evolving general and specific driving skills, this one about co-evolution, this one about different learning techniques, and this one about modelling human driving and evolving tracks. There are several new ones, including one on physical cars, which are not on the website yet - mail me if you want a preprint!
All this assuming that anyone actually reads academic papers... sometimes it seems that not even the guy who writes the paper actually reads it. (Not true in my case, of course!)