> Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. Self driving cars are not machine learning alg

> Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. Self driving cars are not machine learning algorithms. They have machine learning parts in their programing but nobody reputable would hook up a neural network to the pedals and the steering and just let it rip. You simply have a bad mental model of how these machines are built and it shows. There are three big questions every self driving car has to answer: Where I am? What is around me? What to do next? To reliably answer the “where” question you don’t just trust one sensor. You use multiple sensors. Yes, that includes a gps, but also cameras and a lidar and a radar too. It is not machine learning. If you are interested how this is done you need to look up topics like iterative closest point matching, multi-view geometry, kalman-filtering, bag-of-visual-words representation, and bayesian reasoning. To reliably answer what is around the car you likewise use all of your sensors. Yes, this has bits of machine learning in it, but it is not only machine learning. You can and do a lot of model-free perception. For example if your laser is bouncing back from somewhere then there is something there. There is a lot of published literature on sensor fusion and tracking and prediction. These algorithms are not magic, and they are not machine learning. They are just what you also would come up with if you would think about the problem hard for 8 hours a day for tens of years. Then there is the planning. These are not machine learning based algorithms. They usually generate a bunch of different plans, then cull the unsafe ones (for example the ones which would collide with a tracked object) and then you rate the plans according to some heuristic and choose the best, then repeat. It is not magic. There is a serious craft and engineering to it. You can read a good introduction to different approaches in Lavalle’s Planning Algorithms book if you are so interested.