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

> 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. 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.

The AI is getting precise 3D position data and physics data not only about its car but competitors cars - from a 3D physics simulation. The human competitors only get a 2D visual view based on what a race car driver can see from the cockpit. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it seems like the AI is simply deriving the optimal parameters encoded in the 3D physics simulation through iterative testing based on precise 3D physics data supplied directly from the simulation. The humans aren't getting the same data. The human drivers must visually estimate the physics vectors and precise 3D positions from a limited yet rapidly changing 2D rendering. This is quite different from what I initially assumed based on the headline and opening paragraphs of the article.

Given the same precise 3D and vector data in searchable form along with sufficient compute power, it seems plausible a team of human statisticians could work out more optimal driving parameters than top human drivers limited to 2D visuals in nine 24 hour work periods (which is what the AI required to train).

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).

Entertainment for a tiny niche of the market (humans performing for humans) will not be an economically significant space, kind of like classical music today or better yet renaissance music.

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. And this bullshit can actually be a superstimulus that outperforms genuine human interaction. What is missing is decentralized botnets swarming at scale to gradually and unrelentingly amass karma points across the swarm, and use them to move sentiment, markets etc. but that’s coming. Afterwards it’s onto subverting democratic systems with sybil attacks, as well as judicial systems with parallel construction and deepfake “evidence”.

When it matters, the playing field will be stacked heavily against the human who will not have direct access to the informed encoded in the virtual world. Putting it differently, any AI in a simulation is in some sense indistinguishable from the simulation itself (or at least, you should assume so).

GT Sophy is receiving the position of its competitors (which is rhetorical statement because of course it needs to know their position), but where does it say that it's receiving the physics data of its competitors? It does mention that it does receive 'the information about the virtual physical forces affecting its vehicle', but only the forces affecting its vehicle and not the forces affecting the other vehicles (which, IMO, would be irrelevant and, quite possibly, impossible to process given the number of cars on track and the limits of its game loop processing time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbA_CDoWrk&ab_channel=GRANT...