Driverless cars taught by Grand Theft Auto
Driverless cars are training for real-life situations by playing Grand Theft Auto, the computer game known for chases, car jackings and an unsavoury cast of drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes.
Developers at automotive giants such as Ford and Google’s Waymo division are using the virtual world of the computer game to train their driving software while opportunities for real road trials remain limited.
The latest game in the GTA franchise covers an area almost a fifth of the size of Los Angeles, with 262 vehicle types, a complex road system, 14 weather conditions and more than 1000 different unpredictable pedestrians and animals.
Last year scientists at Darmstadt University and Intel Labs found a way to pull visual information from GTA V, taking out the hoodlums and drive-bys.
In January researchers at OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company, released a tool allowing developers to test-drive their software in the game’s Los Santos setting.
Now developers are using the game, as well as other simulators, to train their algorithms to cope with real-world situations such as avoiding obstacles in the road or having multiple cars changing lanes.
Alain Kornhauser, a professor who advises Princeton University’s autonomous vehicle engineering team, told Bloomberg that the game’s universe would never be a substitute for asphalt.
‘‘But it’s the richest virtual environment we could extract data from.’’
The industry continues to harness real-world data too. In a UK project announced yesterday, traffic cameras will be used to train driverless cars how to learn from motorists’ bad behaviour.
This should deliver important insights for the transition period when semi-autonomous and driverless cars share the roads with cars driven by humans.
The government-funded trial will employ images from CCTV units to teach autonomous vehicles how to negotiate busy city centre streets and interact with human-driven cars.
Under the plans, experts will use images from some of the estimated 14,000 cameras in London, feeding footage of millions of manoeuvres into the AI system.
It is hoped that the project will lead to the creation of a fully autonomous Uber-style taxi service in the capital, possibly by 2021. useful side of the DNA spiral.
My paternal grandmother’s default setting was worry. A French Pass farmer’s wife, my mother vividly recalls her motherin-law worrying about her ability to provide enough food for family and guests.
Grandma’s worries had a rational basis – there was no shop around the corner. Adequate meals depended on whether or not my grandfather had killed a sheep, or been out fishing and how many potatoes, leeks, beans, pumpkins and tomatoes were harvestable from the vegetable garden. There was no fridge – just a meat safe on poles sitting in a cool, swampy copse of dense native bush near the house.
Grandma made her own bread and baking, jams and sauces and she preserved fruit and vegetables. She was a fine domestic manager – but still she worried.
I lived with my grandparents one summer, working as an aide at Levin Hospital and Training School (later Kimberley Hospital) to fund university studies.
Grandma was in the throes of Alzheimer’s by then and was just managing at home, cared for by my grandfather with a little outside help.
The disease was steadily deleting her personality – except for the worries. They were hardwired in. I’d come home from work and she’d be searching for her purse, worried she’d lost her small stash of $10 notes; or she’d be standing by the pull-out bread bin, worrying that there wasn’t enough bread for tea.
Her worries were like Hitchcock’s birds, flapping and battering away at her fragile equilibrium. No reassurance was enough. We’d find the purse and place it in her hands, show her the folded notes. She’d nod and move on to another worry. be a bit rough on the Rimutaka Hill.’’
And so I worry – how could I not with this inheritance? At the moment, amongst other things, I worry about Donald Trump, and yes, I amfully aware of how foolish that sounds. But every morning, since he and Kim Jong-un started their absurd posturing, their unreasonably powerful arsenals clutched in their hammy fists like cartoon characters made real, I wake up half expecting to hear Morning Report’s Susie Fergusson announce the start of World War III.
I’ve been here before. I was convinced the world was going to end in October 1964 when Russia’s communist leader Nikita Khrushchev was fired by Leonid Brezhnev.
It’s a vivid memory still, complete with colour and sound: the big brown Bakelite radio, the newsreader’s rounded vowels, the early spring sun angling through the kitchen door onto the worn linoleum.
How on earth did a nine-yearold living on an isolated farm at French Pass even approach this kind of thinking? I don’t remember, although it could have been French Pass school teacher Peter Shea’s devotion to current affairs. But right there is evidence of the power of the worry gene.
Is worrying at all effective? No – it can blight your life. But concern – now that is something else. Concern, thought, planning and resulting action can prevent disaster.
On Anzac Day I believe concern that leads to action would be a good thing. Can we all please get concerned enough to work hard for peace? To state the obvious, a world without war would be the best way of honouring our fallen. And there would be one less area of worry for those of us so prone.