Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
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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)
#2tl;dr
Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It’s true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls “etiquette”: the ability to balance its aggression and timidity, picking the most appropriate behavior for the situation at hand.
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#3so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette?
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#4tl;dr Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It’s true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls “etiquette”: the ability to balance its aggre…
Thank you. I read the full article but they are always just soo unnecessarily long. All the interesting bits could easily be condensed into 5 sentences.
It almost feels offensive, how it wasted my time without giving me equally valuable information in return.
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#5FTA: 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 do that one in a hundred times.”*
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.
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#6so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette?
> so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette?
Having played GT since it's inception, and been involved in motorsports and used GT to learn a few tracks before GT Academy became a thing: on the track you have to have a certain degree of respect for your fellow riders/drivers, these are extremely dangerous machines capable of lots of harm from carelessness or even a simple mistake so being erratic makes you an extreme liability on track; in a game it's less so, and shunts without consequences don't require you to put forethought into an overtake on a banked/cambered turn or late breaking on an uneven/worn part of the track, or taking a certain line to prepare for another move 3 turns ahead etc... and I'm guess this AI has learned from this just like you would if you were about to make contact or potentially wreck on track which REALLY hurts.
The thing is, the crash may not even be the most damaging thing that happens because fights break out after a crash as well since so much adrenaline is pumping through your body and motorsports tends to attract lots of risk taking hot-heads--their are exceptions. So even if you think you are above learning the why, you will soon learn why it's practiced one way or another.
The etiquette component of on-track behavior is almost never present in online play because of that absence and it's why I've always had certain reservations with just assuming a person with sim only experience can be allowed on track with out some track experience before hand--sims are extremely useful and amazing in their feedback but it's not a full replacement. The Nismo GT Academy was cool because it combined both and made a few decent GT drivers in the process.
I think it's the old adage that 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast and speed is the economy of motion' which has allowed many smoother drivers/riders who use this to excel in their field and dominate: Alain Prost, Jorge Lorenzo come to mind.
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#7FTA: 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.
Well, if we left things to non-Human racing we'd soon realize we're severally out matched with enough data and an unlimited engineering budget: Adrian Newey's X2014 launched on GT 6 and was the first example of this [0]. I'm not sure if it's just about destroying the competition making people lose interest, or more like breaking the 9 minute mark at the Nordschleife and seeing that it can be done and raising the bar.
I guess I can see there being some novelty in that, but I'd get tired of it personally since I've suspected and always kind of knew this time would eventually come.
I'm convinced at this point we can build a Formula E car with enough on track data to break lap records that can never be achieved by Humans in any of the previous F1 iterations; it's the same when even the best fighter pilots cannot withstand certain g forces that allow drones/unmanned pilots to make aerial feats that would kill a Human.
Striving to be 'that guy' who got closest to the AI has it's appeal and I'm guessing Sony think so too? If the goal is to sell as many copies of the game and extra DLC, proprietary driving setups/steering wheels, online memberships, Sony TVs, PS5 etc... I think this strategy makes some sense to Sony. People literately spent billions on Fortnight upgrades in it's first 2 years [1], so it stands to reason if you can get a DLC for a specific car/setup that makes you competitive against the AI it could work.
0: https://www.wired.com/2013/12/red-bull-x2014/
1: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-...
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#8tl;dr Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It’s true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls “etiquette”: the ability to balance its aggre…
Thank you. I read the full article but they are always just soo unnecessarily long. All the interesting bits could easily be condensed into 5 sentences. It almost feels offensive, how it wasted my time without giving me equally valuable information in return.
It also absolutely does not tell you how what is probably a multi-layer perceptron can implement etiquette as a neat little add-on...
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#9FTA: 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. Well, if we left things to non-Human racing we'd soon realize we're severally out matched with enough data and an unlimited engineering budget: Adrian Newey's X2014 launched on GT 6 and was the first example of this [0]. I'm…
But for an electronic game, players can’t discriminate between AIs that are incredibly good (and thus could be something expert players try to emulate) and AIs that cheat (and thus frustrate experts). In this example, I think the AI is close to cheating, if not doing it already. It seems to know awfully well how slippy the road surface is.
“This back-and-forth between GT Sophy and the game happens 10 times a second, which Wurman and his colleagues claim matches the reaction time of human players” already may mean the AI is cheating.
A literal interpretation has the AI get live data every 100ms, and react as soon after that as it wants (given current CPUs, that could easily be within a ms), while humans act more as if they receive data from x ms ago, and react y ms later (with x and y in the tens of ms)
Re: Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Well, if we left things to non-Human racing we'd soon realize we're severally out matched with enough data and an unlimited engineering budget: Adrian Newey's X2014 launched on GT 6 and was the first example of this [0]. I'm…
But for an electronic game, players can’t discriminate between AIs that are incredibly good (and thus could be something expert players try to emulate) and AIs that cheat (and thus frustrate experts). In this example, I think the AI is close to cheating, if not doing it already. It seems to know awfully well how slippy the road surface is. “This back-and-forth between GT Sophy and the game happens 10 times a second,…
> I think the AI is close to cheating, if not doing it already. It seems to know awfully well how slippy the road surface is.
Well, I've played the endurance rounds with some friends on GT when we were in the off-season and rebuilding our cars so we pulled out our bucket seats from our cars and had the wheel and peddle setup to have a laugh: these are the kind of races that take 3+ hours with drive swaps in between and have gotten close to winning on completely worn tires only to then be clipped from behind from a lapped AI car and lose it all a couple of laps away from checkered flag.
It's frustrating, but we tried again that day and got the award and I think Sony knew that it's loyal customer base always would, which is why it's moving in this direction without even hiding what it's doing.
If you want pure racing simulators without all the fluff, perhaps iracing is exclusively where you'll have to go for that now.
I'm not exactly sure what to say about it now that I'm older with less time and patience (and perhaps jaded about the video game Industry as a whole) for such things or the fact that I study AI/ML but I see this more as a data-driven iterative step towards leveraging it's brand in order to maximize engagement Online via social media [0] and sales via video games new business model (DLC and other misc purchases) than it is about providing the 'The Real Driving Simulation.'
Which makes the intro of GT2 (still the best in my view) [1] all the more ominous with it's choice of music being a form of Machiavellian foreshadowing and crushing poignance.