'Carcraft' is Waymo's virtual world for autonomous vehicle testing

Earlier this year we watched as an AI kept driving straight into the water in Grand Theft Auto: V. Rather than use Rockstar Games' crime-world magnum opus to train its self-driving vehicles, though, Waymo instead uses Carcraft. Named for Blizzard's enduring online RPG World of Warcraft, it serves as a testing ground for the company's autonomous efforts. Yes, Alphabet built its own virtual world to train self-driving cars. The Atlantic writes that Carcraft began as a way for Waymo to recreate scenarios the autonomous cars experienced on the road. Some 25,000 virtual cars currently tool around "fully modeled" recreations of Austin, home base Mountain View and Phoenix, driving around 2.5 billion miles per day in 2016.