6 ms·

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

93 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

isaacfrond 4y ago
tl;dr Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It’s true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls “etiquette”: the ability to balance its aggression and timidity, picking the most appropriate behavior for the situation at hand.
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  Thank you. I read the full article but they are always just soo unnecessarily long. All the interesting bits could easily be condensed into 5 sentences. It almost feels offensive, how it wasted my time without giving me equally valuable information in return.
  - azalemeth 4y ago
    It also absolutely does not tell you how what is probably a multi-layer perceptron can implement etiquette as a neat little add-on...
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I feel the same way about radiolab pocasts. Interesting topics, unnecessarily drawn out and filled with obnoxious amounts of repetition and pointless music/audio interludes to the point where I'd often just rage quit, but so many people love it and praise the production. There's certainly an audience out there that loves long-winded articles that meander around their topic so that you get the same amount of reading it would take for an in-depth look at a subject but still only come away with a handful of bullet points worth of useful information.
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette?
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette? Having played GT since it's inception, and been involved in motorsports and used GT to learn a few tracks before GT Academy became a thing: on the track you have to have a certain degree of respect for your fellow riders/drivers, these are extremely dangerous machines capable of lots of harm from carelessness or even a simple mistake so being erratic makes you an extreme liability on track; in a game it's less so, and shunts without consequences don't require you to put forethought into an overtake on a banked/cambered turn or late breaking on an uneven/worn part of the track, or taking a certain line to prepare for another move 3 turns ahead etc... and I'm guess this AI has learned from this just like you would if you were about to make contact or potentially wreck on track which REALLY hurts. The thing is, the crash may not even be the most damaging thing that happens because fights break out after a crash as well since so much adrenaline is pumping through your body and motorsports tends to attract lots of risk taking hot-heads--their are exceptions. So even if you think you are above learning the why, you will soon learn why it's practiced one way or another. The etiquette component of on-track behavior is almost never present in online play because of that absence and it's why I've always had certain reservations with just assuming a person with sim only experience can be allowed on track with out some track experience before hand--sims are extremely useful and amazing in their feedback but it's not a full replacement. The Nismo GT Academy was cool because it combined both and made a few decent GT drivers in the process. I think it's the old adage that 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast and speed is the economy of motion' which has allowed many smoother drivers/riders who use this to excel in their field and dominate: Alain Prost, Jorge Lorenzo come to mind.
  - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
    ah, makes sense, thanks for sharing :)
- rkangel 4y ago
Someone 4y ago
FTA: For now, Sony is sticking to games. It plans to put GT Sophy in a future version of Gran Turismo. “We’d like this to become part of the product,” says Peter Stone, executive director of Sony AI America. “Sony’s an entertainment company, and we want this to make the game more entertaining.” Also FTA: “You don’t want to do that because you’ll make a mistake. It’s like a controlled crash,” she says. “I could maybe do that one in a hundred times.”* I don’t see how a computer racer that destroys human competition would make the game more entertaining, I guess there’s work to do there to not make the AI reliably pull of highly risky moves.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > I don’t see how a computer racer that destroys human competition would make the game more entertaining, I guess there’s work to do there to not make the AI reliably pull of highly risky moves. Well, if we left things to non-Human racing we'd soon realize we're severally out matched with enough data and an unlimited engineering budget: Adrian Newey's X2014 launched on GT 6 and was the first example of this [0]. I'm not sure if it's just about destroying the competition making people lose interest, or more like breaking the 9 minute mark at the Nordschleife and seeing that it can be done and raising the bar. I guess I can see there being some novelty in that, but I'd get tired of it personally since I've suspected and always kind of knew this time would eventually come. I'm convinced at this point we can build a Formula E car with enough on track data to break lap records that can never be achieved by Humans in any of the previous F1 iterations; it's the same when even the best fighter pilots cannot withstand certain g forces that allow drones/unmanned pilots to make aerial feats that would kill a Human. Striving to be 'that guy' who got closest to the AI has it's appeal and I'm guessing Sony think so too? If the goal is to sell as many copies of the game and extra DLC, proprietary driving setups/steering wheels, online memberships, Sony TVs, PS5 etc... I think this strategy makes some sense to Sony. People literately spent billions on Fortnight upgrades in it's first 2 years [1], so it stands to reason if you can get a DLC for a specific car/setup that makes you competitive against the AI it could work. 0: https://www.wired.com/2013/12/red-bull-x2014/ https://www.wired.com/2013/12/red-bull-x2014/ 1: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-9-billion-epic-games-apple-antitrust-case https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-...
mrandish 4y ago
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. 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).
- mjburgess 4y ago
  It's always pseudoscience. AI models correlation(Measures(X), Measures(Y)). Marketing sells it as using a theory of how X causes Y. In this case, we want a machine to acquire a causal model of how its actions produce effects, by measuring X and Y itself under its own actions. There is no AI that does this. What we have is a machine "with the answers already" (ie., no need to measure) that has a correlative model.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  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).
EGreg 4y ago
“I don’t think we’ve learned general principles yet about how to deal with human norms that you have to respect,” 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”.
- simiones 4y ago
  > 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. Bullshit. State of the art chatbots can barely convince one mystic minded guy who has no idea how they work and wants to believe that they are real. If you actually try to converse anything even slightly meaningful with one, it quickly becomes obvious that they have no idea what they are talking about. Sure, they can produce some basic reddit memes and such, or plausibly sounding word salads that resemble what some write, but they are a long way away from actually being convincing chat partners. They do slightly better at imitating copypasta news reporting.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    The point is that you don’t need to converse. Most things are passively consumed — articles etc. by the vast majority of people who come away convinced or reshare them. GPT-3 can bullshit many things convingly enough and at scale to make people reshare and vouch for it. Also, other chatbots can leave comments and reshare masquerading as real opinionated supporters in a “mob” and likewise barely answer you. Remember… it’s not that you the one person who talks to them has to be convinced. It’s that your existing forums and chats and platforms can be gradually infiltrated with bots that convince OTHERS the vast majority of whom never did a turing test. Think of how your opinion was formed on many political things, it likely happened non-interactively by just consuming articles and comments, and seemingly “defeated” arguments of OTHERS who could have all been bots.
pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- if you watch the video - it looks like it just has a considerably better grasp of the physics engine at a fundamental level - she mentions at the end that the AI knew when to break into a corner - when to push out - in some instances she wasn't breaking hard into the corner - then pushing out fast -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbA_CDoWrk&ab_channel=GRANTURISMOTV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbA_CDoWrk&ab_channel=GRANT...
KuiN 4y ago
> a video game known for its super-realistic simulations of real vehicles and tracks Don't let the hardcore simmers read this!
justinlloyd 4y ago
"This AI is amazing and destroys humans!" I have about 25 years in the games industry and have worked on a variety of racing games. The "AI" could literally be replaced by any technique we developed for solving this very problem in the last 30 years that has access to the underlying game data, e.g. the physics models and vehicle positions. Until the AI has the same information as the player, it is not an equivalent AI. It is simply a very clever aimbot. Any of the classical techniques would also pretty much destroy any human player too, those techniques are usually turned down from 11 to give each of them a personality or make it realistic for the human to win. This is no different to an RTS "AI" bot destroying a human because it can mash a virtual key a thousand times a second and has complete information on the entire map and all units and all orders issued and can even see through the fog of war. I congratulate the team for what they have achieved, but this is more marketing fluff than meat. My bonafides as to why I hold this opinion on this subject: About 25 years in the games industry as a systems (graphics/engine/gameplay) programmer that has worked on many triple-A games and about 20 years in AI/robotics/machine learning with a MSc CompSci and an MSc in applied AI.
- t_mann 4y ago
  How do you do the turning down? Just curious, doesn't seem like there's an obvious way that's also guaranteed to be fun.
t_mann 4y ago
Reminds me of a question I've always had about game AIs: suppose you have a really good one (like this one, or in chess eg), how do you make the easier difficulty levels? Just throwing random noise into the decisions would probably lead to non-enjoyable outcomes. Is there a structured approach to it?

93 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

tl;dr Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It’s true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls “etiquette”: the ability to balance its aggression and timidity, picking the most appropriate behavior for the situation at hand.

Double_a_92 4y ago
Thank you. I read the full article but they are always just soo unnecessarily long. All the interesting bits could easily be condensed into 5 sentences. It almost feels offensive, how it wasted my time without giving me equally valuable information in return.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  It also absolutely does not tell you how what is probably a multi-layer perceptron can implement etiquette as a neat little add-on...
- autoexec 4y ago
  I feel the same way about radiolab pocasts. Interesting topics, unnecessarily drawn out and filled with obnoxious amounts of repetition and pointless music/audio interludes to the point where I'd often just rage quit, but so many people love it and praise the production. There's certainly an audience out there that loves long-winded articles that meander around their topic so that you get the same amount of reading it would take for an in-depth look at a subject but still only come away with a handful of bullet points worth of useful information.

shreyshnaccount 4y ago

so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette?

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> so it picked the best moves on time? that's super cool. but how's it etiquette? Having played GT since it's inception, and been involved in motorsports and used GT to learn a few tracks before GT Academy became a thing: on the track you have to have a certain degree of respect for your fellow riders/drivers, these are extremely dangerous machines capable of lots of harm from carelessness or even a simple mistake so being erratic makes you an extreme liability on track; in a game it's less so, and shunts without consequences don't require you to put forethought into an overtake on a banked/cambered turn or late breaking on an uneven/worn part of the track, or taking a certain line to prepare for another move 3 turns ahead etc... and I'm guess this AI has learned from this just like you would if you were about to make contact or potentially wreck on track which REALLY hurts. The thing is, the crash may not even be the most damaging thing that happens because fights break out after a crash as well since so much adrenaline is pumping through your body and motorsports tends to attract lots of risk taking hot-heads--their are exceptions. So even if you think you are above learning the why, you will soon learn why it's practiced one way or another. The etiquette component of on-track behavior is almost never present in online play because of that absence and it's why I've always had certain reservations with just assuming a person with sim only experience can be allowed on track with out some track experience before hand--sims are extremely useful and amazing in their feedback but it's not a full replacement. The Nismo GT Academy was cool because it combined both and made a few decent GT drivers in the process. I think it's the old adage that 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast and speed is the economy of motion' which has allowed many smoother drivers/riders who use this to excel in their field and dominate: Alain Prost, Jorge Lorenzo come to mind.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  ah, makes sense, thanks for sharing :)
rkangel 4y ago

Someone 4y ago

FTA: For now, Sony is sticking to games. It plans to put GT Sophy in a future version of Gran Turismo. “We’d like this to become part of the product,” says Peter Stone, executive director of Sony AI America. “Sony’s an entertainment company, and we want this to make the game more entertaining.” Also FTA: “You don’t want to do that because you’ll make a mistake. It’s like a controlled crash,” she says. “I could maybe do that one in a hundred times.”* I don’t see how a computer racer that destroys human competition would make the game more entertaining, I guess there’s work to do there to not make the AI reliably pull of highly risky moves.

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> I don’t see how a computer racer that destroys human competition would make the game more entertaining, I guess there’s work to do there to not make the AI reliably pull of highly risky moves. Well, if we left things to non-Human racing we'd soon realize we're severally out matched with enough data and an unlimited engineering budget: Adrian Newey's X2014 launched on GT 6 and was the first example of this [0]. I'm not sure if it's just about destroying the competition making people lose interest, or more like breaking the 9 minute mark at the Nordschleife and seeing that it can be done and raising the bar. I guess I can see there being some novelty in that, but I'd get tired of it personally since I've suspected and always kind of knew this time would eventually come. I'm convinced at this point we can build a Formula E car with enough on track data to break lap records that can never be achieved by Humans in any of the previous F1 iterations; it's the same when even the best fighter pilots cannot withstand certain g forces that allow drones/unmanned pilots to make aerial feats that would kill a Human. Striving to be 'that guy' who got closest to the AI has it's appeal and I'm guessing Sony think so too? If the goal is to sell as many copies of the game and extra DLC, proprietary driving setups/steering wheels, online memberships, Sony TVs, PS5 etc... I think this strategy makes some sense to Sony. People literately spent billions on Fortnight upgrades in it's first 2 years [1], so it stands to reason if you can get a DLC for a specific car/setup that makes you competitive against the AI it could work. 0: https://www.wired.com/2013/12/red-bull-x2014/ https://www.wired.com/2013/12/red-bull-x2014/ 1: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-9-billion-epic-games-apple-antitrust-case https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-...

mrandish 4y ago

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. 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).

mjburgess 4y ago
It's always pseudoscience. AI models correlation(Measures(X), Measures(Y)). Marketing sells it as using a theory of how X causes Y. In this case, we want a machine to acquire a causal model of how its actions produce effects, by measuring X and Y itself under its own actions. There is no AI that does this. What we have is a machine "with the answers already" (ie., no need to measure) that has a correlative model.
andsoitis 4y ago
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).

EGreg 4y ago

“I don’t think we’ve learned general principles yet about how to deal with human norms that you have to respect,” 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”.

simiones 4y ago
> 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. Bullshit. State of the art chatbots can barely convince one mystic minded guy who has no idea how they work and wants to believe that they are real. If you actually try to converse anything even slightly meaningful with one, it quickly becomes obvious that they have no idea what they are talking about. Sure, they can produce some basic reddit memes and such, or plausibly sounding word salads that resemble what some write, but they are a long way away from actually being convincing chat partners. They do slightly better at imitating copypasta news reporting.
- EGreg 4y ago
  The point is that you don’t need to converse. Most things are passively consumed — articles etc. by the vast majority of people who come away convinced or reshare them. GPT-3 can bullshit many things convingly enough and at scale to make people reshare and vouch for it. Also, other chatbots can leave comments and reshare masquerading as real opinionated supporters in a “mob” and likewise barely answer you. Remember… it’s not that you the one person who talks to them has to be convinced. It’s that your existing forums and chats and platforms can be gradually infiltrated with bots that convince OTHERS the vast majority of whom never did a turing test. Think of how your opinion was formed on many political things, it likely happened non-interactively by just consuming articles and comments, and seemingly “defeated” arguments of OTHERS who could have all been bots.

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- if you watch the video - it looks like it just has a considerably better grasp of the physics engine at a fundamental level - she mentions at the end that the AI knew when to break into a corner - when to push out - in some instances she wasn't breaking hard into the corner - then pushing out fast -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbA_CDoWrk&ab_channel=GRANTURISMOTV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbA_CDoWrk&ab_channel=GRANT...

KuiN 4y ago

> a video game known for its super-realistic simulations of real vehicles and tracks Don't let the hardcore simmers read this!

justinlloyd 4y ago

"This AI is amazing and destroys humans!" I have about 25 years in the games industry and have worked on a variety of racing games. The "AI" could literally be replaced by any technique we developed for solving this very problem in the last 30 years that has access to the underlying game data, e.g. the physics models and vehicle positions. Until the AI has the same information as the player, it is not an equivalent AI. It is simply a very clever aimbot. Any of the classical techniques would also pretty much destroy any human player too, those techniques are usually turned down from 11 to give each of them a personality or make it realistic for the human to win. This is no different to an RTS "AI" bot destroying a human because it can mash a virtual key a thousand times a second and has complete information on the entire map and all units and all orders issued and can even see through the fog of war. I congratulate the team for what they have achieved, but this is more marketing fluff than meat. My bonafides as to why I hold this opinion on this subject: About 25 years in the games industry as a systems (graphics/engine/gameplay) programmer that has worked on many triple-A games and about 20 years in AI/robotics/machine learning with a MSc CompSci and an MSc in applied AI.

t_mann 4y ago
How do you do the turning down? Just curious, doesn't seem like there's an obvious way that's also guaranteed to be fun.

t_mann 4y ago

Reminds me of a question I've always had about game AIs: suppose you have a really good one (like this one, or in chess eg), how do you make the easier difficulty levels? Just throwing random noise into the decisions would probably lead to non-enjoyable outcomes. Is there a structured approach to it?