A fleet of self-taught self-driving cars will soon hit the road

An unusual fleet of self-driving cars will take to the road in coming months. Unlike most automated vehicles, which are programmed to deal with the situations they may encounter, these cars will have taught themselves, in simulation, how to handle tricky scenarios safely. The cars will learn to navigate busy intersections, crowded highways, and packed rotaries using reinforcement learning, an approach inspired by the way animals learn to associate a reward with the behavior that led to it. Mobileye, an Israeli company that provides vehicle safety systems to many carmakers, announced at CES in Las Vegas last week that it will test the approach on the road, in collaboration with the German automaker BMW and the chip company Intel, in the second half of this year. In reinforcement learning, a computer is not hand-coded, or given specific examples to learn from; instead, it experiments, altering its own programming in light of the behavior that most reliably leads to a certain result.