Sony's AI race car driver beat the world's best humans

Sony has developed what it's calling a breakthrough artificial intelligence program for the Gran Turismo series of PlayStation racing games. The software, called Gran Turismo Sophy, is so sophisticated, Sony says, that it handily beat a group of the world's best virtual race car drivers in test version of the 2017 game Gran Turismo Sport in October. "Outracing human drivers so skillfully in a head-to-head competition represents a landmark achievement for AI," Chris Gerdes, a Stanford professor specializing in autonomous driving, wrote in a Nature article published alongside Sony's research. Gerdes said this research could one day affect self-driving car development, according to Wired. "GT Sophy's success on the track suggests that neural networks might one day have a larger role in the software of automated vehicles than they do today," Gerdes wrote.