Ready, Set, Algorithms! Teams Learn AI by Racing Cars

Anyone with an Amazon Web Services account can participate in the league. Teams or individuals can compete online in "virtual" races or in person at events world-wide. Teams build and train AI algorithms using Amazon SageMaker software, deploy them to self-driving cars measuring about 10 inches, then race them around a track of roughly 17 feet by 26 feet. "It's actually having practical applications," said James Rhodes, chief technology officer of investment research firm Morningstar. Thanks to the training, the company expects to have dozens of projects based on reinforcement learning and other machine-learning techniques in deployment by the end of 2020, he said.