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

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

#41

Post by EricMausler » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

raz32dust wrote: post #20

andsoitis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why humans should insist on competing with AIs in our world not theirs (simulation). 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).

It's hard to draw the boundary. We could say that AI should only be given access to exactly the same information that humans have access to. But AI will have magnitudes more memory and compute resources. So for example, an AI could only have the 2D view but it could store, access and process the 2D view in ways a human cannot.

It has to do with input data. Part of the game is rationalizing what is on the screen and maintaining a memory or prediction of offscreen activity. When they get direct feeds to game data, it's cheating.

The AI should be given a game screen. I think it should also need to actually use a mouse and keyboard too if im being honest.

I would be way better at games if I only need to think about what I want to do in the game and have it done rather than use some method of physical controls to do so

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

#42

Post by t0mas88 » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

cdkmoose wrote: post #38

RajT88 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

F1 drivers do the same thing through a chicane or wide on a curve to maintain speed, leaving the smoothest road surface for that advantage (not the skidding).

That's about taking a different line. Drivers will start as far out on the kerb as possible to make the overall turn less tight, allowing them to take that turn at a higher speed.

What this AI was doing is something that only works in sim-racing. It's done by humans sometimes in iRacing. Drop a wheel on the grass to make use of the fact that the sim will cause a consistent rotation (yaw) from it. Which can help turn a car into a corner.

It can't be done in reality, because the effect on the car isn't predictable on a real race track.

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

#43

Post by nomel » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #15

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.…

That's why humans should insist on competing with AIs in our world not theirs (simulation). 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).

> with AIs in our world not theirs

The benefit of keeping things in "their world" is that "our world" requires massive investment in sensors, while the exact same algorithms would be used. Letting them play in their world means you can focus on the algorithms. But, I agree that it should be fair. Putting a human in front of a screen with a steering wheel is in no way comparable to the sensory experience of being in a car. I'm fine around a race track, but racing simulators are nearly impossible for me.

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

#44

Post by rad_gruchalski » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

t0mas88 wrote: post #42

cdkmoose wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F1 drivers do the same thing through a chicane or wide on a curve to maintain speed, leaving the smoothest road surface for that advantage (not the skidding).

That's about taking a different line. Drivers will start as far out on the kerb as possible to make the overall turn less tight, allowing them to take that turn at a higher speed. What this AI was doing is something that only works in sim-racing. It's done by humans sometimes in iRacing. Drop a wheel on the grass to make use of the fact that the sim will cause a consistent rotation (yaw) from it. Which can help turn…

> It can't be done in reality, because the effect on the car isn't predictable on a real race track.

Maybe a driver could work it out in training for a single race and in a certain corner but the cost of getting it wrong is not only not finishing the race but also having a race car in the barrier, so a damaged car.

On a race track, drivers usually know characteristics of every corner for selected weather conditions. For example: at the Nordschleife, exit of Foxhole into Adenauer Forst is safe to cut in the dry but a no no in the wet, unless you’re in a GT3 class car with enough downforce.

It is the same with kerbs, stay out of then when it is wet, use them in the dry. But it’s all touch and go when the conditions change and sometimes that leads to a crash.

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

#45

Post by runnerup » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 11:13 PM UTC

EricMausler wrote: post #41

raz32dust wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to draw the boundary. We could say that AI should only be given access to exactly the same information that humans have access to. But AI will have magnitudes more memory and compute resources. So for example, an AI could only have the 2D view but it could store, access and process the 2D view in ways a human cannot.

It has to do with input data. Part of the game is rationalizing what is on the screen and maintaining a memory or prediction of offscreen activity. When they get direct feeds to game data, it's cheating. The AI should be given a game screen. I think it should also need to actually use a mouse and keyboard too if im being honest. I would be way better at games if I only need to think about what I want to do in the gam…

> I think it should also need to actually use a mouse and keyboard too if im being honest.

I'd go one step further and say those mouse inputs should be "fuzzed" a bit as a function of "actions per minute" because humans lose accuracy (both in the time domain and spatial domain) when they try to make more actions faster and faster. Obviously APM needs to be capped as well, preferably actually slightly lower than human APM.

The main reason for this to me is that it will help guide the AI's towards generating strategies which humans can actually emulate and learn from.

If you want to have an AI-only tournament, then by all means make up your own rules. If you want to say your AI "beat a human" then you have to be playing the same damn game.

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

#46

Post by MikeBVaughn » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 11:46 PM UTC

t0mas88 wrote: post #42

cdkmoose wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F1 drivers do the same thing through a chicane or wide on a curve to maintain speed, leaving the smoothest road surface for that advantage (not the skidding).

That's about taking a different line. Drivers will start as far out on the kerb as possible to make the overall turn less tight, allowing them to take that turn at a higher speed. What this AI was doing is something that only works in sim-racing. It's done by humans sometimes in iRacing. Drop a wheel on the grass to make use of the fact that the sim will cause a consistent rotation (yaw) from it. Which can help turn…

The modeling in iRacing is really striking in that way. It's good enough in practice that driving in the sim is extremely convincing, which makes the odd methods of exploiting the physics model that much more striking.

I saw a video a few months ago of people running an endurance race in iRacing, and they'd consistently drop their left-side (IIRC, it could have been right) tires off the track on a specific straightaway. My understanding is that a) they didn't lose that much speed, b) because of the reasons stated previously, it's fairly safe in the sim, and c) it kept the front left tire temperatures closer to the optimum for the full duration of the lap. Thinking on it, one of the things I found cool was that, in a way, it's not entirely unlike what real drivers will do with wet-weather tires, where they sacrifice the best line to hunt for wetter stretches.