Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#201

Post by roadnottaken » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 10:53 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #133

Niten wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This especially scares me as a cyclist. I'm sure they'll put a lot of effort into preventing automated cars from hitting other vehicles or slow-moving pedestrians. Now what about bicycles traveling around 20 mph in the right-hand side of the lane? Many people seem to neglect or completely fail to understand the risk of increased perception of safety leading to an overall decreased safety in these systems. We can't ha…

I'm an avid cyclist. I think I'd prefer a deterministic, law abiding driver to the average human. What makes me feel unsafe are the drivers who break the law (you don't know who you are) and the drivers who hate cyclists and pass us as closely as possible, throw bottles at us, etc (you do know who you are). What makes me feel unsafe is the unpredictability. I would expect a computer would just follow the rules exactl…

When we get self-driving bikes they'll be able to navigate around human OR robotic cars much more effectively and then you can just relax.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#202

Post by loewenskind » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 11:06 AM UTC

dandelany wrote: post #13

Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself. In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalk…

I recall an article on here not too long ago about mine cars (I believe in Australia) that ran 20kph and 10 meters apart when driven by human, but over 120kph and 6cm apart when driven by robots (numbers completely pulled by memory and almost certainly all wrong). Robotic drivers will be better in almost every way. All of your concerns go for people as well and people have proven themselves very bad at driving.

My biggest fear is that there will be a manual override.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#203

Post by loewenskind » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 11:13 AM UTC

megablast wrote: post #90

gojomo wrote: post #29

Finally! A giant step towards 'packet-switched' personal transport, using dynamically-routed, market-dispatched autonomous cars on standard roads. Cancel the bullet train, and instead plow all that money into rapidly deploying this.

This is not a solution to much, apart from getting stupid people away from control of vehicles. We still need to move to mass transportation, to reduce pollution, decrease traffic, stop our reliance on fossil fuels, increase productivity, remove noise, free up space in cities, and lots of other reasons.

I totally disagree. We don't need mass transport to deal with pollution, we need transportation that doesn't rely on fossil fuels.

Personally I view mass transport as the stop gap to deal with the fact that cars really suck today. Mass transport will never be optimal because (a) it is mass transport, which means sharing space with a bunch of (potentially sick) strangers and (b) the bigger the group the less common the final location. A car can go exactly from point A to point B but a train can only go between stations. Every change between train (city-to-city) to tram/bus (location within city) is wasted time, as is every tram/bus stop that you don't use.

In my perfect world we would get rid of mass transport and just have a sort of network of cars. Most trips people take are planned well in advance so you could schedule when you want to leave, walk outside and step into the car that's waiting there for you, kick back and wait to be let out at the door of where ever it is you're going. The car wont need to park because when it's done with you it goes for the next person.

Something like this would be much more efficient than mass transport that has to just keep on making the same trips regardless of how many or how few people are using it at those times because people might need to use it.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#204

Post by rue » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 11:56 AM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #175

rue wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even discounting buggy software; think hardware, wiring. It is quite possible that a malfunction will take place (they do, constantly). I could go for "fully computerised traffic would be significantly safer than human traffic", but absolutes about the former being unfailing are just silly.

I think we'll need multiple processors thinking independently and reaching consensus before the gas pedal is pushed and letting any single processor hit the brakes (and disengage the gas, of course). Also good would be to allow other cars to request that a car stop, perhaps even communicating with the traffic control network to make it stop. And of course, there will be the Android app the pedestrian can use as a las…

Reminds me of a 0.1-version of this application that I heard about some years ago: some guy saw a fairly fast-moving heading toward a red light with pedestrians crossing with the driver looking down at something. Guesstimating the car was about to be too close to stop in time, the guy threw his cell at the car and got the driver's attention.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#205

Post by clistctrl » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 3:36 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #197

Groxx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they cannot be perfect Two things: 1) neither are people; far from it. (you already knew this though, so...) 2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving . Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. The transition is almost guaranteed to occur at some poi…

Suppose a robot driver is 1/10th as likely to hit and kill a person as a human driver. It would still be something that would happened. And when it did, the results would very messy since the law presently sees any accident through the lens of finding a person at fault. When a robot kills (and a robot will kill if they are "out there") is the fault that of the owner or the manufacturer or the programmer?

I assume the programmer works for a company, and the manufacturer is simply building the device. If the problem was related to faulty components, then I would assume the manufacturer. A flaw in the software or design? I would then contribute it to the company that designed the bot. If the device is improperly used then it would be the owner. I think it all comes down the specifics inside the context.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#206

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 4:03 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #197

Groxx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they cannot be perfect Two things: 1) neither are people; far from it. (you already knew this though, so...) 2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving . Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. The transition is almost guaranteed to occur at some poi…

Suppose a robot driver is 1/10th as likely to hit and kill a person as a human driver. It would still be something that would happened. And when it did, the results would very messy since the law presently sees any accident through the lens of finding a person at fault. When a robot kills (and a robot will kill if they are "out there") is the fault that of the owner or the manufacturer or the programmer?

[deleted]

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#207

Post by mcantor » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:17 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #193

mcantor wrote: post #186

Have they tested it in the rain? Have they tested it in the snow? Have they tested it driving on ice? Does it know when its fuel gets low? Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating? Have they driven it on the highway? Have they driven it on the countryside? How does it treat cyclists? How does it treat pedestrians? How does it treat deer, squirrels, birds and other fauna on the road? How does…

> Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating? Sorry, how do YOU know when your head gasket has blown and the car is overheating? What's that, your first indicator is the electronic temperature sensor on your dashboard !? My, there certainly is no way a computer could detect that. If you are about to say, you detect it through loss of power, steam from the engine bay, coolant in the oil... I go…

> The things you list are not "this is why automatic driving is impossible". They are just "here's special cases we have to make sure to catch".

You are exactly correct; this is actually all I meant to express in my post. I suppose I should not be surprised that my comment was taken to be espousing one of the prevailing extremes! Sorry about that--I should have been a little less terse.

> most drivers would not detect a blown head gasket until the car simply stopped functioning, and the engine was completely destroyed anyway.

Ironically, this exact thing happened to me at the end of last year. That's actually why I included it in my list... not because I think it's un-doable, but because I really really hope it's an edge case they cover! :-)

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#208

Post by Groxx » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:40 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #188

Groxx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, kernel panics aside. Unless they're using a random number generator seeded with outside data, all computer operation can be called deterministic and 100% predictable. Because it's 100% repeatable given identical preconditions. People? Not so / not currently doable. If the wrong operation for a situation were performed, it'd be due to a higher-level decision going wrong, not the command. Meanwhile, people can "hit…

Wow. I don't even know where to start on that one, because that is about 100% the opposite of true. I work on autonomous driving robots. Teams I have been on in the past won extremely competitive autonomous vehicle competitions. Our robots crashed all the time. ALL THE TIME! There is nothing deterministic about how autonomous systems work. In fact our algorithms were by definition random number generators! We randoml…

It's deterministic. You can run a fully-accurate simulation of your entire setup in a computer, feed in the current input data, and get the precise output in the simulation that the real one would get.

That's essentially the definition of deterministic. If your machine is powerful enough, you can even do it before the real one completes its operations. Anything deterministic is predictable in this manner.

That you can't predict it, or that you don't have a computer powerful enough to predict it has nothing to do with something not being deterministic, nor predictable. Even a massive, PRNG-influenced neural network is deterministic.

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On an aside for people who are thinking of quoting the halting problem at me:

The halting problem requires that the detector returns an answer, and it must be true or false and accurate, or the proof through paradox fails. Therefore, it cannot simulate the operation of what it's detecting, because there could be an infinite loop which would cause it to run without end. You also cannot merely abort it after a while, as that would be either a 3rd return state ("unknown") or an inaccurate response.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#209

Post by Groxx » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:53 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #77

andreyf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving. Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. Even if you have near perfect data about where the other cars are there's always uncertainty about other objects on the road: tree branches, deer, a child running after…

True, but once you know what other cars are doing, and get data from cars ahead, you should be able to identify things like that before you even encounter them. A tree falling on a car while it's driving: relatively unavoidable. Cars hitting that car: far less likely with computers. They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times. And pile-ups due to an accident are often far more dea…

For many of those below, a rebuttal, and some more meta discussion:

I have made no claims that computers can make flawless decisions. I make no claims they can detect / avoid everything avoidable. I don't know where you're getting the idea that I've said this, unless you're dragging in past battles with other people - everywhere I've claimed computers would do better I've included qualifiers like "likely".

The point I was trying to make is that the instructions of a computer, barring external phenomena which cannot be accounted for, are fully deterministic and accurate. If the high-level decisions are made incorrectly, then the end result will be incorrect, but all down the path everything will be accurately performed.

Not so with humans (just look at someone with epilepsy, or at your own memory), or at least not in the minds of some people, which is the only reason I include it. And, if nothing else, we're far further from accurately simulating an entire human body / neural net than from simulating another computer.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#210

Post by Groxx » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:59 PM UTC

Niten wrote: post #142

Groxx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they cannot be perfect Two things: 1) neither are people; far from it. (you already knew this though, so...) 2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving . Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. The transition is almost guaranteed to occur at some poi…

And I suppose we'll have to get rid of bicycles and pedestrians, too, in this perfect world where intuition of human behavior is unnecessary to safely pilot a vehicle on the road?

Far from it. If cars were less dangerous to bikers and pedestrians, people could actually use bike lanes safely, and cross at walk signals.

Besides. I never said nor implied "perfect". Merely better, and being better is easier without other human drivers, who can far more quickly take a bad (or good) situation and make it worse. Bikes don't go 60+ mph and weigh over a ton. Neither do pedestrians. And very few of either of those carry large quantities of gasoline.