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Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

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Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#21

Post by astrobe_ »

Someone wrote: post #5

FTA: For now, Sony is sticking to games. It plans to put GT Sophy in a future version of Gran Turismo. “We’d like this to become part of the product,” says Peter Stone, executive director of Sony AI America. “Sony’s an entertainment company, and we want this to make the game more entertaining.” Also FTA: “You don’t want to do that because you’ll make a mistake. It’s like a controlled crash,” she says. “I could maybe…

> I don’t see how a computer racer that destroys human competition would make the game more entertaining

Indeed that looks like the racing version of aimbots.

I remember a thread on HN before about AI in guys. A game developer said that at some point if you make enemies too smart, the game becomes more frustrating.

"AI beats players at game X" is less often a practical advance (e.g. classic chess engines already beat casual/semi-serious players, what's the need to utterly "destroy" them, really?) and more often a media stunt aimed at impressing potential customers for more profitable uses.

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#23

Post by rkangel »

shreyshnaccount wrote: post #3

so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette?

One extra observation I would make on top of the sibling's detailed answer is why I believe iRacing is by far the best online racing game.

iRacing has an MMR value called iRating which is used to match you against drivers of a similar skill level (like every online game) but it also has the unique concept called 'safety rating'. Safety rating is based on your 'incidents per corner' over some recent history of corners (in the 1000 to 10000 range). Safety rating controls which official racing series you're allowed to enter - higher level stuff like F1 cars requires a better safety rating than the entry level Mazda MX-5.

Having the need to maintain (or improve) this safety rating gives the 'risk' incentive to drivers which most online games are lacking. In real racing a desire not to put your car into a wall at high speed controls how dangerously people drive, but that risk doesn't exist online and so in a lot of games (e.g. the F1 games) people attempt stupid dive-bomb overtakes, take out their competitors and make it less fun to play. Safety rating puts that incentive back. It's not perfect of course, but it does help iRacing feel more 'real' and 'fair'.

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#24

Post by justinlloyd »

"This AI is amazing and destroys humans!"

I have about 25 years in the games industry and have worked on a variety of racing games. The "AI" could literally be replaced by any technique we developed for solving this very problem in the last 30 years that has access to the underlying game data, e.g. the physics models and vehicle positions. Until the AI has the same information as the player, it is not an equivalent AI. It is simply a very clever aimbot. Any of the classical techniques would also pretty much destroy any human player too, those techniques are usually turned down from 11 to give each of them a personality or make it realistic for the human to win.

This is no different to an RTS "AI" bot destroying a human because it can mash a virtual key a thousand times a second and has complete information on the entire map and all units and all orders issued and can even see through the fog of war.

I congratulate the team for what they have achieved, but this is more marketing fluff than meat.

My bonafides as to why I hold this opinion on this subject: About 25 years in the games industry as a systems (graphics/engine/gameplay) programmer that has worked on many triple-A games and about 20 years in AI/robotics/machine learning with a MSc CompSci and an MSc in applied AI.

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#25

Post by cyborgx7 »

Someone wrote: post #5

FTA: For now, Sony is sticking to games. It plans to put GT Sophy in a future version of Gran Turismo. “We’d like this to become part of the product,” says Peter Stone, executive director of Sony AI America. “Sony’s an entertainment company, and we want this to make the game more entertaining.” Also FTA: “You don’t want to do that because you’ll make a mistake. It’s like a controlled crash,” she says. “I could maybe…

>I don’t see how a computer racer that destroys human competition would make the game more entertaining, I guess there’s work to do there to not make the AI reliably pull of highly risky moves.

Maybe not a fun challenge to race against, but a benchmark to check your performance. Like modern chess engines.

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#26

Post by simiones »

EGreg wrote: post #13

“I don’t think we’ve learned general principles yet about how to deal with human norms that you have to respect,” That’s only in phase 1. Afterwards when humans are outnumbered by vast bot swarms, and all their content and capital is vanishingly tiny, these norms won’t matter. Also, human participation won’t matter, and will likely be similar to the paralympics or women’s tennis (but orders of magnitude suckier). Ent…

> EVERYTHING you are used to online — including these comments - can already be convincingly deepfaked by adversarial networks trained on throwing bullshit at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Bullshit. State of the art chatbots can barely convince one mystic minded guy who has no idea how they work and wants to believe that they are real. If you actually try to converse anything even slightly meaningful with one, it quickly becomes obvious that they have no idea what they are talking about.

Sure, they can produce some basic reddit memes and such, or plausibly sounding word salads that resemble what some write, but they are a long way away from actually being convincing chat partners. They do slightly better at imitating copypasta news reporting.

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#27

Post by richiezc »

RajT88 wrote: post #16
mrandish wrote: post #11

I think this is material info which needs to be noted: > GT Sophy doesn’t get the same view of the game that human players do. Instead of reading pixels off a screen, the program takes in updates about the position of its car on the track and the positions of the cars around it. It also gets sent information about the virtual physical forces affecting its vehicle. In response, GT Sophy tells the car to turn or brake.…

It caught my eye as well. If you imagine a real car, this is the sort of detailed sensor data you would get from it. The sensor data in the game is never wrong though, as it comes direct from memory. The other thing which caught my eye was this: > For example, GT Sophy often drops a wheel onto the grass at the edge of the track and then skids into turns. This works consistently because (again) it's not the real world…

>> For example, GT Sophy often drops a wheel onto the grass at the edge of the track and then skids into turns.

> This works consistently because (again) it's not the real world where the grass has subtle variations.

Well I mean maybe they just trained it on Initial D anime, Sony is a Japanese company after all

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#28

Post by EGreg »

simiones wrote: post #26
EGreg wrote: post #13

“I don’t think we’ve learned general principles yet about how to deal with human norms that you have to respect,” That’s only in phase 1. Afterwards when humans are outnumbered by vast bot swarms, and all their content and capital is vanishingly tiny, these norms won’t matter. Also, human participation won’t matter, and will likely be similar to the paralympics or women’s tennis (but orders of magnitude suckier). Ent…

> EVERYTHING you are used to online — including these comments - can already be convincingly deepfaked by adversarial networks trained on throwing bullshit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Bullshit. State of the art chatbots can barely convince one mystic minded guy who has no idea how they work and wants to believe that they are real. If you actually try to converse anything even slightly meaningful with one, it qu…

The point is that you don’t need to converse. Most things are passively consumed — articles etc. by the vast majority of people who come away convinced or reshare them.

GPT-3 can bullshit many things convingly enough and at scale to make people reshare and vouch for it. Also, other chatbots can leave comments and reshare masquerading as real opinionated supporters in a “mob” and likewise barely answer you.

Remember… it’s not that you the one person who talks to them has to be convinced. It’s that your existing forums and chats and platforms can be gradually infiltrated with bots that convince OTHERS the vast majority of whom never did a turing test.

Think of how your opinion was formed on many political things, it likely happened non-interactively by just consuming articles and comments, and seemingly “defeated” arguments of OTHERS who could have all been bots.

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#29

Post by wsinks »

EGreg wrote: post #13

“I don’t think we’ve learned general principles yet about how to deal with human norms that you have to respect,” That’s only in phase 1. Afterwards when humans are outnumbered by vast bot swarms, and all their content and capital is vanishingly tiny, these norms won’t matter. Also, human participation won’t matter, and will likely be similar to the paralympics or women’s tennis (but orders of magnitude suckier). Ent…

I don't have much to add here except you've revitalized my fear of this situation.

Any other thoughts on what the phases are?

Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

#30

Post by wsinks »

EGreg wrote: post #28
simiones wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EVERYTHING you are used to online — including these comments - can already be convincingly deepfaked by adversarial networks trained on throwing bullshit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Bullshit. State of the art chatbots can barely convince one mystic minded guy who has no idea how they work and wants to believe that they are real. If you actually try to converse anything even slightly meaningful with one, it qu…

The point is that you don’t need to converse. Most things are passively consumed — articles etc. by the vast majority of people who come away convinced or reshare them. GPT-3 can bullshit many things convingly enough and at scale to make people reshare and vouch for it. Also, other chatbots can leave comments and reshare masquerading as real opinionated supporters in a “mob” and likewise barely answer you. Remember……

Thank you for your second post (kind of answered my other reply to you already)

I've seen how gnarly instagram bot comments already are, and wondered how many people are bots vs. people on there. It's not economical to turing test them all, so I've had to assume that they're all propaganda... and even then I've noticed the influence on deciding what's social.

How would you measure the success of this, if you were making them?

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