Today, Sony has released an AI driver called GT Sophy and defeated human champion drivers in Sony’s blockbuster game Gran Turismo 3A!
This achievement has also made it to the cover of Nature magazine, which is a great promotion for the upcoming release of Gran Turismo 7 on the PS platform.
Gran Turismo is not just an entertainment game, but seeks highly realistic operations. The fact that GT Sophy can beat human drivers is absolutely remarkable.
Chris Gerdes, a professor of Automotive Engineering at Stanford University, said that GT Sophy’s skilled overtaking of human drivers in the race is a milestone progress.
Sony used a deep learning method called QR-SAC, in which the AI gets rewards or penalties according to its performance during training. Thus, GT Sophy learned to drive on the race track in just a few hours.
However, Sony’s researchers point out that this reward and punishment system must be used with caution. If the AI is overly rewarded for aggressive driving, it may end up bullying opponents on the track.
Sony’s researchers also indicated that compared to human players, GT Sophy does have some advantages, such as accurate map information with track boundary coordinates, accurate information on tire load, tire slip angle, and other vehicle states.
But in the battle between human and artificial intelligence, AI has the upper hand in terms of action frequency and reaction time.
GT Sophy’s input limit is 10Hz, while the theoretical maximum input for humans is 60Hz. Regarding reaction time, GT Sophy can respond to events in the game environment within 23-30 milliseconds, which is much faster than the 200-250 millisecond reaction time of professional athletes.
To make the competition fairer, researchers added delays to the AI’s response time. They set GT Sophy’s reaction time to 100 milliseconds, 200 milliseconds, and 250 milliseconds, respectively. Even so, GT Sophy’s performance was still amazing. In the competition, GT Sophy outperformed several world-class racers, including the 2021 TGR GT Cup champion, the 2020 National Cup World Champion, the 2021 runner-up, and the 2018 National Cup Asia/Oceania Champion.
The latest Gran Turismo 7 will also be available on PS platform on March 4th. However, this most powerful AI will not be included for the time being.
In light of the recent news of Sony’s establishment of an electric vehicle company, this news becomes even more interesting. Chris Gerdes, an automotive professor at Stanford University, also stated that GT Sophy’s achievements demonstrate the vast potential of neural networks in autonomous driving.
🔗Source: THE Verge
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.