Last month, Alphabet offered up its first proper look at Carcraft. The simulation is a virtual home away from home (the real world) for Waymo's self-driving vehicles. Here, you'll find a replica of every real-world mile the autonomous cars have driven. By honing in on a traffic signal in a particularly busy intersection, Waymo demonstrates how Carcraft can teach its connected vehicles to envision an exhaustive amount of scenarios (including hazards). In turn, the cars can then practice the manoeuvres that will help them safely navigate these situations in the real world.

Google's sister company Waymo has kept the software and testing it is using to develop self-driving cars under tight secrecy - until now. For the first time, Waymo, the firm's autonomous research sister company, has opened its doors to reveal the'Carcraft' simulation software and Castle, a secret training center on an old Air Force base in California. Castle is a 100-acre hidden mock city that can quickly be configured to test different scenarios and includes residential streets, expressway-style streets, cul-de-sacs, parking lots, and more. For the first time, Waymo, Google's sister company, has opened its doors to reveal its technology and discreet training facility called'Castle' that resides north of the Merced metro area where the Castle Air Force Base used to be. This image shows a roundabout on the site Waymo built after encountering it in Texas, and the car struggling.

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.