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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."
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.
I don't know much about the techniques underlying Forza 2, but I went over and talked to the guys who worked on Forza 1, and we compared our approaches. At least for the first game, what they are actually using is recorded trajectories on different track segments which are then spliced together at the junctions of segments, so as to create similar-looking behaviours on unseen tracks. The problem here is of course that the new tracks are constrained to being constructed out of the same segments as the driver has already been tested on - there is no generalization. The track designers for Forza simply had to live with this constraint.
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We have ourselves gotten player modelling working fine with evolutionary neural networks, which can generalize, but the Forza team didn't consider these techniques reliable and fast enough in time for the release of the original game. Maybe things have changed with Forza 2.
There is some information on the Forza AI on http://research.microsoft.com/mlp/forza/, and our approach to modelling is described in http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2006Making.pdf
Note that all this is about modelling behaviour, not about creating new behaviour from scratch; there are some papers on this on my website as well.
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!)
Sitting in a car with my missus driving is much the same as being in a driverless car:
Biggest difference is that the thing is more likely to know the way to someplace.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Just a small point - marketing driverless car software as a 'killer app' - probably a bad idea.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---