Amazon Wants You to Code the AI Brain for This Little Car

Two years ago, Alphabet researchers made computing history when their artificial intelligence software AlphaGo defeated a world champion at the complex board game Go. Amazon now hopes to democratize the AI technique behind that milestone--with a pint-size self-driving car. The 1/18th-scale vehicle is called DeepRacer, and it can be preordered for $249; it will later cost $399. It's designed to make it easier for programmers to get started with reinforcement learning, the technique that powered AlphaGo's victory and is loosely inspired by how animals learn from feedback on their behavior. Although the approach has produced notable research stunts, such as bots that can play Go, chess, and complicated multiplayer electronic games, it isn't as widely used as the pattern-matching learning techniques used in speech recognition and image analysis.