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Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#321
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber did not get unlucky -- they are simply an evil company. Their cars need human intervention every 13 miles as opposed to Google's every 5,600 miles -- they were not fit for the road but Uber let them out anyways. Uber should be shut down and the principals should get life without parole.

The numbers you are comparing do not measure the same thing.

Care to expand on that?

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Poisson distribution assumes equal probability of events occurring. That seems to me to be an oversimplification, given that AV performance varies over time as changes are made, and also given that terrain / environment plays a huge factor here, whether looking at one particular vehicle or comparing to vehicles across companies (and drivers in general). Since AV performance will hopefully be improved when an acci…

To be more clear, when you run poisson.test(1, conf.level = 0.95) with the default values of T and r (which are both 1) you are performing the following two-sided hypothesis test: Null hypothesis: The true rate of events is 1 (r) with a time base of 1 (T). Alternative hypothesis: The true rate is not equal to 1. The reason that you end up with a p-value of 1 is because you've said that you've observed 1 event in a ti…

Ok I re-ran setting T properly for both cases. The results were similar:

> poisson.test(c(1, 11800), c(3, 1000000), alternative = c("two.sided"),conf.level = .93)

Comparison of Poisson rates

  data:  c(1, 11800) time base: c(3, 1e+06)
  count1 = 1, expected count1 = 0.035403, p-value = 0.03478
  alternative hypothesis: true rate ratio is not equal to 1
  93 percent confidence interval:
     1.006334 146.142032
  sample estimates:
  rate ratio 
    28.24859
The lower bound of the CI approaches a rate ratio = 1 for a 93% confidence interval.

Interestingly, if you multiply the CI I claimed before by the rate ratio instead of the expected rate, you get almost exactly the same CI as here.

  > ci  28.24859 * ci
  [1]   1.006418 146.116208
 
* Note 11800 is about two years of pedestrian deaths and time units are in millions of miles. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#323
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's what happened here. The LIDAR would be visible from afar and that lady just watched the car run into her without flinching. In all seriousness, what you're describing happens on college campuses across the country today, where students are conditioned to drivers yielding right of way.

Part of that conditioning is that in many of those places, drivers are legally required to yield the right of way.

Something I learned in motorcycle class, very applicable here: Laws are for the living, or, yea you had right of way but you're still dead.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I misread the numbers in the original post. But what you say in your comment- well, that's not how it works. To assess the risk posed by a driver, you wouldn't follow them around, constantly logging the miles they drive, counting the deaths they cause and continuously updating the probability they will kill someone, at least not in the real world (in a simulation, maybe). Instead, what you'd do is wait for enough peo…

Do you have any math do back up that what I said is wrong? I can try to explain my point better but I see you are ignoring the math so maybe I should not waste my time.(we can reduce the problem to balls in a jar and make things easy) But think about this, if I killed a person in my first 10 km of driving, what is the chance that will kill 0 after the next 999990, would you bet that I will kill 0 or 1 , more then 10?

I think what you mean by "maths" is "formulae" or "equations". Before you get to the formulae, you have to figure out what you're trying to do. If the formulae are irrelevant to the problem at hand you will not find a solution.

As to your question- I wouldn't bet at all. There is no way to know.

Here's a problem from me: I give you the number 345.

What are the chances that the next number I give you is going to be within 1000 numbers of 345?

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#325
post #319
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're under the impression you are informed. These metrics, however, are not the same. You don't know what Uber's equivalent metric is at. That doesn't mean you should compare different metrics as if they were the same.

I was just quoting from the NYT. I don't have any special knowledge but there does seem a difference there.

[deleted]

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, that's not legally an unmarked crosswalk under California rules, then? (Streets are not meeting at approximately right angles and the local authorities have posted 'no pedestrians'.)

On the surface, no. But... The end of that walking path is perpendicular to the roadway. The other end of that walking path is perpendicular to the roadway on the other side. How it behaves in the middle (not perpendicular) is irrelevant. The walking path itself is legally considered a roadway. The "no pedestrians" sign does not face pedestrians crossing as this pedestrian did, it faces the road. So... in California…

Are you arguing that the second image here (the one marked 8:27 PM) https://twitter.com/EricPaulDennis/status/975891554538852352 is a perpendicular intersection of the end of a sidewalk with the roadway?

Is there another walkway/roadway intersection that's approximately perpendicular that I'm not seeing? (I have to assume that we're looking at different areas of the map, because I give you enough credit that you aren't arguing that these two characters are perpendicular right at the end: \| )

I agree with your closing notion that there is a question of contributory fault. What started this sub-branch was my argument that the pedestrian's contribution was not 0.00%. I also don't think that the Uber Volvo's share is 0.00%.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the surface, no. But... The end of that walking path is perpendicular to the roadway. The other end of that walking path is perpendicular to the roadway on the other side. How it behaves in the middle (not perpendicular) is irrelevant. The walking path itself is legally considered a roadway. The "no pedestrians" sign does not face pedestrians crossing as this pedestrian did, it faces the road. So... in California…

Are you arguing that the second image here (the one marked 8:27 PM) https://twitter.com/EricPaulDennis/status/975891554538852352 is a perpendicular intersection of the end of a sidewalk with the roadway? Is there another walkway/roadway intersection that's approximately perpendicular that I'm not seeing? (I have to assume that we're looking at different areas of the map, because I give you enough credit that you aren…

It is sufficiently close to perpendicular that I would call it an unmarked crosswalk. If it is not intended to be a crosswalk, it is not the pedestrian's fault to use it as a crosswalk... it is the traffic engineer's fault for designing an unsafe crosswalk.

The pedestrian's contribution may not be 0%, but it is definitely lower than both the traffic engineer's share and Uber's share.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that the second image here (the one marked 8:27 PM) https://twitter.com/EricPaulDennis/status/975891554538852352 is a perpendicular intersection of the end of a sidewalk with the roadway? Is there another walkway/roadway intersection that's approximately perpendicular that I'm not seeing? (I have to assume that we're looking at different areas of the map, because I give you enough credit that you aren…

It is sufficiently close to perpendicular that I would call it an unmarked crosswalk. If it is not intended to be a crosswalk, it is not the pedestrian's fault to use it as a crosswalk... it is the traffic engineer's fault for designing an unsafe crosswalk. The pedestrian's contribution may not be 0%, but it is definitely lower than both the traffic engineer's share and Uber's share.

The intersection of the pedestrian walkway (red line) is "close to perpendicular" with the roadway (yellow line)?

https://imgur.com/keA4Xsw

(From Eric's twitter stream, it seems like the collision may have even been at the pink line, which is even farther from perpendicular than the red line.)

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#329
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that number becomes arbitrary. If it was measured in deaths per lightyear your 'n' would become 0. You know what I meant when I said "n=1".

No, i dont know what you mean. I know only that your comments do not portray a deep understanding of statistics and probability. Do your own homework to determine the liklihood of a low probability event ocurring within a small number of observations. That is you answer to the question of how meaningful it is that Uber experienced a fatality in only 3,000,000 miles.

You crossed into incivility in this subthread and provoked a pointless spatty flamewar. Please don't do that again. There's no reason not to be respectful, regardless of how much you know about statistics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a reasonable gut feeling to not generalize from n=1, but the numerical evidence - with either a Bayesian or frequentist approach - is actually quite strong and statistically significant. Math here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16655081

That's not right. You're setting your expectation for N = 100m miles, then updating it for N = 3 million miles? That's like saying: "I rolled this red d20 twenty times before I rolled a 1, whereas I rolled a 1 the first time on this blue d20, so the red d20 is obviously better and I'm rolling all my saves on it". Or, I don't know- "I rolled three 1s on this d20 in twenty rolls so it's obviously not a fair d20".

Can you clarify? What do you believe to be wrong and why?

If you have a strong prior the dice are equivalent, then yes, the rolls shouldn't change your mind.

If you have a prior that the dice are weighted in an unknown way, then yes, the rolls really should change your mind.

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