This article seems to be a summary of Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW.[1] That's worth a watch. It gives a good overview of how Google does it.
How Self-Driving Cars Work
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in theory the number of sensors seems not the most important element ;-) I hear this comment a lot when defending Tesla's choices, and it's a red herring. The fact that humans only rely on two cameras means nothing. Repeating old comments of mine: You also don't "need" megawatts of power to play top-level Go: humans do it with 100 watts of energy.…
Your point is generally valid, but it's worth noting that power =/= energy. It is conceivable that at 100 watts of power, a human could use on the order megawatt hours of energy while practicing to achieve top-level performance. 10000 hours of practice is not unreasonable to achieve mastery which would be 1MWh. It's also likely that AlphaGo is reasonably efficient, given that it used custom ASICs.
Patience. It's early for Go. Remember when it took Deep Blue to play grandmaster-level chess? Now your laptop can do it. All of the better commercial chess programs now play above human level. Well above human level; the top programs are rated around 3300 on a good laptop, and the highest human rating is currently 2882.
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#33This article misses a lot of things technology wise. OK, I understand that. This article also misses a lot air companies like Daimler who showed off self driving car captibilities publicly in the beginning 2000 and on the web 3 years ago. It misses the prototypes shown off by Audi and BMW. It misses also the prototypes shown by Japanese car manufacturers. From technology companies it misses Bosch who will show off at…
On the component front, last March, Continental acquired the automotive LIDAR product line from Advanced Scientific Concepts.[1] This may help. ASC, which is a bunch of physicists and engineers in Santa Barbara, has a very good flash LIDAR. They sell it to DoD and Space-X for about $100K. There's no reason it needs to be that expensive in volume. Continental is the third largest maker of auto parts. If they can get the ASC technology down in price, all those silly rotating things will go away.
[1] http://www.continental-automotive.com/www/automotive_de_en/t...
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point is generally valid, but it's worth noting that power =/= energy. It is conceivable that at 100 watts of power, a human could use on the order megawatt hours of energy while practicing to achieve top-level performance. 10000 hours of practice is not unreasonable to achieve mastery which would be 1MWh. It's also likely that AlphaGo is reasonably efficient, given that it used custom ASICs.
There is also a difference between learning and playing. During play, the human operated at ~20 watts on computation while the machine ran at a rate of anywhere from 26,000 watts to 260,000 watts, depending on how efficient the TPUs are (and assuming 10x as the ideal case). The human is also learning new things about Go as it plays , planning complex muscle firing programs, filtering audio and managing attention, wor…
You're confusing professional level with world champion level. How many megajoules will it take to create a world champion Go player using the human brain? It would take multiple brains, each teaching each other. We can now train a professional-level Go player pretty cheaply — Zen Go plays at a professional level and runs on commodity hardware.
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#35This article misses a lot of things technology wise. OK, I understand that. This article also misses a lot air companies like Daimler who showed off self driving car captibilities publicly in the beginning 2000 and on the web 3 years ago. It misses the prototypes shown off by Audi and BMW. It misses also the prototypes shown by Japanese car manufacturers. From technology companies it misses Bosch who will show off at…
On the component front, last March, Continental acquired the automotive LIDAR product line from Advanced Scientific Concepts.[1] This may help. ASC, which is a bunch of physicists and engineers in Santa Barbara, has a very good flash LIDAR. They sell it to DoD and Space-X for about $100K. There's no reason it needs to be that expensive in volume. Continental is the third largest maker of auto parts. If they can get t…
A disadvantage of the ASC is the far more limited field of view. I mean, the rotating thingie has 360 FOV (I personally think it's not silly at all), if you want to see that wide with the ASC's, you've got to put more on a vehicle.
As a side note, how do you guys find out things like who buys who and whos's got what interesting tech? Especially when they're selling only to suppliers, as is the case here? You just stumble on the information, know someone who knows someone or what?
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also a difference between learning and playing. During play, the human operated at ~20 watts on computation while the machine ran at a rate of anywhere from 26,000 watts to 260,000 watts, depending on how efficient the TPUs are (and assuming 10x as the ideal case). The human is also learning new things about Go as it plays , planning complex muscle firing programs, filtering audio and managing attention, wor…
You're confusing professional level with world champion level. How many megajoules will it take to create a world champion Go player using the human brain? It would take multiple brains, each teaching each other. We can now train a professional-level Go player pretty cheaply — Zen Go plays at a professional level and runs on commodity hardware.
No, that is a ridiculous comparison. Then you should start counting the energy required to construct the Google server farm, the energy of all the computers used by all the engineers who built the farm while they were in university, on and on and on.
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the component front, last March, Continental acquired the automotive LIDAR product line from Advanced Scientific Concepts.[1] This may help. ASC, which is a bunch of physicists and engineers in Santa Barbara, has a very good flash LIDAR. They sell it to DoD and Space-X for about $100K. There's no reason it needs to be that expensive in volume. Continental is the third largest maker of auto parts. If they can get t…
A disadvantage of the ASC is the far more limited field of view. I mean, the rotating thingie has 360 FOV (I personally think it's not silly at all), if you want to see that wide with the ASC's, you've got to put more on a vehicle. As a side note, how do you guys find out things like who buys who and whos's got what interesting tech? Especially when they're selling only to suppliers, as is the case here? You just stu…
Once the price comes down, you can have more sensors to get full circle coverage. A typical configuration is long-range sensors aimed forward, with shorter-range sensors aimed to the sides and rear. Volvo uses an arrangement like that, and the sensors aren't very visible. One approach is to devote the top inch or so of the windshield to sensors, and design the car's headliner accordingly. Mobileye puts their camera between the rear view mirror and windshield.
There are lots of companies working on low-end LIDAR. ASC's technology is known to work well; it just costs too much because it involves custom sensor ICs built with a nonstandard GaInAs process. Quanergy has been issuing a lot of press releases and getting funding, but they seem to have backed off from their Fraunhofer is working on a technology for making flash LIDAR sensors using a regular CMOS process.[1] If that works, these things will come down to digital camera prices in volume.
Bloomberg has most acquisition information. I picked this up because I've been following ASC since the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge days, when I went to Santa Barbara to see their technology. It was just on an optical bench then, not ready to deploy, but they had the technology with long-term promise. I dragged a VC down there to talk to them, but he didn't see near-term volume application. He was right; only now is there a market in sight for LIDAR units by the millions. High production volume is probably still 5-10 years away.
[1] https://www.ims.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ims/de/documents/D...
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
A disadvantage of the ASC is the far more limited field of view. I mean, the rotating thingie has 360 FOV (I personally think it's not silly at all), if you want to see that wide with the ASC's, you've got to put more on a vehicle. As a side note, how do you guys find out things like who buys who and whos's got what interesting tech? Especially when they're selling only to suppliers, as is the case here? You just stu…
Once the price comes down, you can have more sensors to get full circle coverage. A typical configuration is long-range sensors aimed forward, with shorter-range sensors aimed to the sides and rear. Volvo uses an arrangement like that, and the sensors aren't very visible. One approach is to devote the top inch or so of the windshield to sensors, and design the car's headliner accordingly. Mobileye puts their camera b…
Re Quanergy: Although the Quanergy site claims all their units have no moving parts, a university in France which evaluated their M8, the only thing they're actually shipping, writes this: The Quanergy M8 LIDAR system consists of 8 2D line scanners located on a spinning head which can spin at a rate from 5 Hz to 30 Hz. The 8 lasers are spread out over a 20° vertical field of view (FOV) and the entire unit rotates to give a full 360° by 20° FOV.[1]
[1] http://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci.n...
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're confusing professional level with world champion level. How many megajoules will it take to create a world champion Go player using the human brain? It would take multiple brains, each teaching each other. We can now train a professional-level Go player pretty cheaply — Zen Go plays at a professional level and runs on commodity hardware.
No, that is a ridiculous comparison. Then you should start counting the energy required to construct the Google server farm, the energy of all the computers used by all the engineers who built the farm while they were in university, on and on and on.
Now you're suggesting calculating the energy used by the human champion's ancestors, which I am not suggesting.
The computer can train itself with just records of past games and self-play. The world champion level human cannot. You must account for the difference in training.
Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also a difference between learning and playing. During play, the human operated at ~20 watts on computation while the machine ran at a rate of anywhere from 26,000 watts to 260,000 watts, depending on how efficient the TPUs are (and assuming 10x as the ideal case). The human is also learning new things about Go as it plays , planning complex muscle firing programs, filtering audio and managing attention, wor…
You're confusing professional level with world champion level. How many megajoules will it take to create a world champion Go player using the human brain? It would take multiple brains, each teaching each other. We can now train a professional-level Go player pretty cheaply — Zen Go plays at a professional level and runs on commodity hardware.
I did not actually. I pointed out the approx energy required to get to 1 dan professional then pointed out that a system trained with orders of magnitude more energy was still far less capable. To get to Lee Sedol is still To say AlphaGo or any RL system is learning from self-play is not in the typical understanding of the phrase. It's more akin to evolving with competitions against previous versions of itself, which should count as different instances. As stated on page 38 of 1604.00289.pdf
Between the publication of Silver et al. (2016) and before facing world champion Lee Sedol, AlphaGo was iteratively retrained several times in this way; the basic system always learned from 30 million games, but it played against successively stronger versions of itself, effectively learning from 100 million or more games altogether (Silver, 2016).
In comparison, from that same paper, it was estimated that Sedol could not have played much more than 50,000 games. My own estimate is about 40,000 games.
As for work required to learn, it's irrelevant to point out that one can learn from others. Learning, whether from play, books or study still requires energy spend and work by the learner. Most of the extra work is from study, occasional review with a tutor and discussions with peers--the last more of a meta-step: learning to learn. Accounting for books and some time with tutors will not, I argue, shift the budget much. Especially if you include that any machine playing Go requires overhead of power infrastructure, energy, cooling, networking equipment and occasional maintenance staff. And learning, improvement in architecture, requires searching through and discarding many changes and playing through a cumulative hundreds of millions of games.
The fact that humans have other available highly efficient means of learning is a boon and not a downfall. That's the whole point of getting to AGI. Learning from books and others is akin to learning by Program Synthesis from specifications.