Playing Grand Theft Auto can teach autonomous cars how to drive

GETTING computers to recognise other cars is surprisingly difficult. Earlier this year, the first fatal autonomous car crash happened when a Tesla Model S failed to distinguish a white truck against a brightly lit sky. Now a study has shown that self-driving cars can be taught the rules of the road by studying virtual traffic on video games such as Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V). Although firms like Google and Uber are teaching their software by physically driving millions of miles in the real world, they also train their algorithms using pre-recorded footage of traffic. But there's a catch: computers need hundreds of thousands of laboriously labelled images, showing where vehicles begin and end, to make them expert vehicle recognisers.