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I would argue that driving in traffic is essentially a physically social activity, like a pack of wolves or a flock of birds or a school of fish moving together
by snowwrestler 7y ago
I would argue that driving in traffic is essentially a physically social activity, like a pack of wolves or a flock of birds or a school of fish moving together. There is a tremendous amount of communication happening between the individuals, but not overt language. It's physical communication which requires empathy (i.e. seeing things from someone else's perspective) to accurately interpret and make predictions from.
A simple example is to be in a lane next to a lane that ends. Everyone sees the same signs that indicate that lane is ending; everyone knows the cars in that lane are going to get over. But there are a variety of strategies for doing so: get over early; wait until the last minute; accelerate to merge; slow down to merge; use the opportunity to pass; etc. Some drivers are nervous and cautious; some are aggressive. The way the cars move on the road, the signals they provide like brake lights and turn signals, are a form of communication that you, the potentially yielding driver, can interpret and make decisions about how to deal with the merge. Or prevent it! If that is your inclination.
This seems like a hard problem IMO. Perceiving objects is essentially about physics--detecting and recognizing. Next step harder, making physical predictions e.g. how far a moving object will travel in 200 milliseconds. Maybe that's enough to keep a self-driving car safe, but it won't make it very efficient in heavy traffic (which is the norm in urban areas). To interpret intent as part of a prediction seems way harder than even that. Reminder that when humans start driving they typically have 16-18 years of continuous social learning... and even then it usually takes years to become a comfortably safe driver in traffic.
Of course this would be way easier if all the cars were self-driving, all at once, but that seems like a really hard way to implement this technology. I think you'd have to have a city with very strong leadership that defines a small area that is self-driving only (working with one or more private companies to provide the vehicles), and then slowly grow the boundaries of that zone.
- DennisP 7y agoYou may be right, but one of your analogies undermines your point. Realistic bird flocking has been famously replicated in simulations by having birds follow three simple rules, none of them requiring empathy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Flocking_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Flocking_r... So it might be a relatively easy problem for cars, if all the cars could be made to follow a common set of rules. It gets more difficult with humans who may follow different rules, or even actively exploit the rules of the automated vehicles.
- snowwrestler 7y ago> So it might be a relatively easy problem for cars, if all the cars could be made to follow a common set of rules. Yes, one way to make a problem easier to solve is to make the problem easier. (But how...) I admit that if people acted exactly like birds, self-driving cars would be easier to implement.
- DennisP 7y agoI wonder whether game theory would be helpful. If flocking rules could be found which were a Nash equilibrium, then the incentive for human drivers would be to play along. Maybe it would even be a decent predictor of what humans already do.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bo1024 7y agoAbsolutely right. * Object detection is not solved. * Even if it were, prediction requires a theory of mind. What does the other person see, know, and want to do? * Even if we solved prediction, driving requires social interaction, coordination, and cooperation. I think self-driving car companies will try solve this with remote internet-connected operators that step in and remotely flash some lights or something to communicate. Of course these people will be overworked and underpaid, will have no skin in the game and not really care (at the end of another long shift) about your particular interaction with their company's vehicles...
- pas 7y agoRecognizing a car that is going to let you in in front of it is not black magic. Yes, it will take a lot of data. Yes it has to be done safely. Self-driving cars will have to learn and join the dance. Sure, a fallback remote pilot is probably going to happen too, but that's a very big can of worms. Just think about what happens if the remote pilot wants to take the car through a rail crossing and the connection drops. Whoops.
- bo1024 7y agoHmm, what about letting another car in front of you? I think trying to solve this with pure data will end up like the chat bots that seem real for two sentences and then fail disastrously when you try to actually converse.
- pas 7y agoI find that most of the problem of merging come from lack of randomness. That is both parties think the other should have already acted, so they think it's not their turn to act. Eg. I already slowed down yet the other party hasn't even started merging, so I'll speed up. Then the other car just starts to turn. Bah, I have to slow down. But they noticed I sped up, so they reverse their course, and we're already approaching the end of their lane, so ... poor other car has to now come to a complete halt, and either wait for a bunch of cars to pass, or this lane will have to come to a stop too to let that car in. And so on. So some kind of consistency would help. If the self-driving car decides to let the other car in front of it, then slow down, wait a bit, then okay, chance missed, go ahead. How else would it work? This part is classic reinforcement learning. I don't think this policy part is the hard part. (Eg. similar speed merging, and from-stop merging, or stop and let other car in.) Probably each brand will have a personality. (Based on their timeouts and other parameters.) And humans will adapt quickly. (And naturally the self-driving cars will change over time too.) Chat requires an amazing amount of implied context. Merging? Not so much. Driving in general? Yes, that does, because there are strange edge cases. (Like what to do when you are lost, or the car breaks down, etc.)