Thirteen university students from across Canada are in Ottawa to put their artificial intelligence skills to the test. It's called the Amazon Web Services DeepRacer League, where small 1/18th scale cars are being trained to complete a racetrack as fast as possible, by themselves. "It has major components in order to do the autonomous driving," says Amanda Foo, DeepRacer Senior Technical Program Manager. They are driven by what is called reinforcement learning. "It's just like training a dog," Carleton University mechanical engineering student Masoud Karimi says.

I first wrote about AWS DeepRacer at this time last year, and described it as an opportunity for you to get some hands-on experience with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Along with the rest of the AWS team, I believe that you should always be improving your existing skills and building new ones. We launched the AWS DeepRacer car and the AWS DeepRacer League so that you could have the opportunity to get experience and new skills in a fun, competitive environment. In less than a year, tens of thousands of developers have participated in hands-on and virtual races located all over the world. Their enthusiasm and energy have been inspiring, as has been the creativity.

The DeepRacer league, developed by Amazon Web Services, is designed to teach a branch of artificial intelligence known as reinforcement learning. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed the DeepRacer League, a competition designed to teach a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) known as reinforcement learning, in which algorithms learn the correct way to perform an action based on trial and error, and observations. As part of the DeepRacer League, teams or individuals build and train AI algorithms using Amazon SageMaker software, then deploy them to self-driving model cars measuring about 10 inches long, which they race around a track roughly 17 feet by 26 feet. Morningstar is one of the companies participating in the DeepRacer League, and 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 next year. AWS developed the DeepRacer program in an effort to teach software developers about machine learning in a more engaging way than reading scientific articles.