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."

Comments

In case of rapture

[Harmonious Botch]

At least now they won't cause accidents.

Seriously, this is a technology whose time has come. Persuading elderly drivers to give up their cars is difficult, and the baby boom generation is putting a lot of people in that situation in the next decade or two.