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Self-Driving Car Speed Race Ends With A Crash (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader writes:On a professional track in Buenos Aires, fans watched the first Formula E auto race with self-driving electric cars. "Roborace's two test vehicles battled it out on the circuit at a reasonably quick 115MPH," reports Engadget, "but one of the cars crashed after it took a turn too aggressively. The racing league was quick to tout the safety advantages of crashing autonomous cars ('no drivers were harmed'), but it's clear that the tech is still rough around the edges." Electrek is reporting that the cars "still have a cabin for a driver but neither car's cabin was occupied during the event." The ultimate goal is to have several teams racing the exact same self-driving car, while letting each team customize its car's driving software.
An Argentinian journalist shared footage of the race cars on Twitter, and apparently at one point a dog wandered out in front of an oncoming race car. But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?
An Argentinian journalist shared footage of the race cars on Twitter, and apparently at one point a dog wandered out in front of an oncoming race car. But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?
Nobody gives a fuck about Formula E.
No problem, they can replace the audience with robots.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
sing along? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdizL4on-Rc .. cease fire stand down..
I like the fact that the hardware is identical, but teams can make their own software. The race also offers a nice way to measure progress in a controlled environment that still offers enough challenges to be useful in the real world.
The physical risk to the driver, and the driver's skill under pressure are what makes watching motor racing exciting.
Take them both away by replacing it with software and all you have is another boring nerdfest.
No excitement means no spectators. No spectators means no money. No money means no sport.
People watch racing because there is risk of a crash with humans in the cockpit. People drive in professional racing because there is a risk to themselves. Those things translate into money, jobs, technological advancements in vehicles (performance and safety). Take away the human element and it's like sitting and watching airplanes fly. Interesting for a few visits, but no sustainable market and not really entertaining. Put up a bar and bleacher stand, and it would be mostly empty.
Hell, look at the robot warrior events, which are cool but don't make money for any duration of time.
If they are doing this to build safety, no spectators needed. IMHO, bit whoop. Sarcastiball anyone?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I think in the early days, these races might be entertaining.
I can imagine that eventually some kind of optimum strategy may evolve and all the teams use it, and then the cars will all do the same thing and the race will be boring. But in the early days, with people trying different strategies, stuff might happen that is interesting to watch.
I remember back at my first job, we found some kind of game where you wrote a program to control a robot tank in the game, and the whole game was to have matches between people's programs. The programming language was simple and there were APIs for things like "throw out a radar ping", "turn tank", "rotate turret", "fire gun", "check to see if tank is damaged", etc. There were many different strategies available: you could write a tank that never checked if it was being damaged, but just drove around crazily all the time to be hard to lock onto; you could write a tank that, when it got a ping, would try to lock onto that tank and follow it and keep shooting it until it was dead; you could try to write a balanced tank that would check if it was damaged and evade if so, try to figure out where other tanks were and just send shots in that general direction, etc. We had great fun with it for a while, and then one of the developers (not me, sadly) wrote a tank program that was dramatically more effective than all the others. The fun died away when it became "watch Rich's tank destroy your tank and all the others".
The question is whether Rich's program was actually optimum in some sense (did the best possible according to the simple simulation rules) or whether we could have beaten it if we had been more clever. I'm not sure. I wish I had copies of the source code to all the bots from back then, now that I have a lot more experience in software development and I might get more out of the game.
This was years ago and I couldn't tell you what game it was exactly, but there are plenty of programming games around.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
> The racing league was quick to tout the safety advantages of crashing autonomous cars ('no drivers were harmed'), but it's clear that the tech is still rough around the edges.
There are upper limits to what you can computationally compensate for. That doesn't mean the tech is "rough". It does say a lot about how people who are in charge of the league are either intentionally trying to put a negative spin or are just plain stupid.
Entertaining? Sure... just release random animals out onto the track. DQ teams that hit the animals.
It should have everybody on the edge of their seats.
People watch racing because there is risk of a crash with humans in the cockpit.
That is totally absurd. People love watching destruction, yes, but humans do not have to be involved for enjoyment - witness the great ratings shows like Robot Wars got, and those were glorified remote control cars. People just liked watching them violently disassemble each other...
The same will be true of e-racing. Fans will still thrill to a crash, because it will still show basically the same thing - a super expensive car disintegrating into scrap. In fact though it could be even more fun than human races since the rules could be altered such that AI cars had to drive through any wreckage present, no cleanup during the race. That would be awesome to see as AI did high speed moves to avoid scrap...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm sure with time self-driving cars will be nearly as accident-free as cars with drivers in them.
I love how people continue to insist that the issue is with anything other than the software. I have seldom seen such ignorance and denial in my life. I hate to break it to the valley, but life on earth is not a high school science fair. Ridiculous.
If you had bothered to read my whole post you would have seen I mentioned specifically Robot wars. Ratings were mediocre at best on a mediocre market channel. Racing has a massive fan base, sell out crowds across the globe, massive amounts of funding for product spokespersons, massive sponsor contracts and awards.
If human risk was not an issue in drawing and maintaining crowds then you need to explain a continued success of boxing, UFC, Xtreme Games, The Blue Angels and Redbull extreme flying events, various forms of racing. While people don't necessarily root for injury Football, Basketball, Hockey, and Baseball all have large elements of human risk. That risk may not be the whole reason for professional sports popularity, but to deny it's a factor is an outright lie.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Robot wars used differing hardware.
Pretty much it was the same few designs. So all of the fun was watching to see which approach ended up working.
The same is true of racing AI, especially to see different approaches in passing or speed management will be interesting. The thing that would kill it is if the AI's are not aggressive enough to be interesting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They'll hype it up as if it's NASCAR, advertise like its NASCAR, but make a crap load more money because of having no driver. Though, I wonder if betting will be legal because would it be chance or skill?
Self driving cars aren't going to be terribly good at measuring road feel and that moment when you feel grip suddenly let go and make the correction to stay on the road.
Oh sure, the cars can measure it and graph it and log it, but they also need to respond instantly. Most of the AI driving stuff seems to assume the road will be a set geometry and properly marked and generally smooth and dry and clean. And roads are rarely like that.
All it would take to mess up AI racing is an oil slick or an animal or person or a tree falling or a part falling off another car or any number of other things for the AI to become overwhelmed.
Sig for hire.
But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?
This question answers itself if framed within the context of the racing genre:
"But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching paint dry, knowing that the paint wasn't applied by a real person?"
Having the cars operated by software rather than by human drivers doesn't change anything.
"..how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?"
They watch NASCAR don't they? It's pretty obvious the American race
audience doesn't have that high of an expectation.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A lot of the self-driving car development atm is based around normal highway and town/city driving speeds. There's some valuable research data that stands to be gathered by testing self-driving cars at higher speeds, and one of the ways to encourage that development would be to make a competition out of it. If they can recoup some of that development cost by tapping into whatever entertainment value the spectacle presents, what's wrong with that?
Instead of discussions about how a car without need for a cockpit would eventually look, or the handling of a car where brakes, power and possibly even wheel direction could be modulated to each of the wheels differently I see a bunch of upvotes on why it will be boring. Some sad $%#!
love is just extroverted narcissism