The Gran Turismo Sophy A.I. does a lap of the course. The Gran Turismo Sophy A.I. does a lap of the course. An artificial intelligence program has beaten the world's best players in the popular PlayStation racing game Gran Turismo Sport, and in doing so may have contributed towards designing better autonomous vehicles in the real world, according to one expert. The latest development comes after an interesting couple of decades for A.I. playing games. It began with chess, when world champion Garry Kasparov lost to IBM's Deep Blue in a match in 1997.

Sony has developed what it's calling a breakthrough artificial intelligence program for the Gran Turismo series of PlayStation racing games. The software, called Gran Turismo Sophy, is so sophisticated, Sony says, that it handily beat a group of the world's best virtual race car drivers in test version of the 2017 game Gran Turismo Sport in October. "Outracing human drivers so skillfully in a head-to-head competition represents a landmark achievement for AI," Chris Gerdes, a Stanford professor specializing in autonomous driving, wrote in a Nature article published alongside Sony's research. Gerdes said this research could one day affect self-driving car development, according to Wired. "GT Sophy's success on the track suggests that neural networks might one day have a larger role in the software of automated vehicles than they do today," Gerdes wrote.

An artificial intelligence has beaten four of the world's best human drivers on three different tracks in the racing video game Gran Turismo Sport, by gaining ground at the most difficult parts of a track. The AI, named GT Sophy, was able to execute tactical moves such as using an opponent's slipstream to boost itself forwards and block its opponents from passing. Peter Wurman at Sony AI in New York and his colleagues trained the system using deep reinforcement learning, a type of machine learning that uses rewards and penalties to teach the AI's neural network how to win. During training, GT Sophy, which was running on a separate computer, played the game on up to 20 PlayStation 4 consoles simultaneously. The team gave the AI the ability to accelerate, brake and steer, along with real-time information on the position of the cars in the game, including its own, and a map of the next 6 seconds of the track, which meant sight of a longer distance ahead when the AI travelled faster.

When humans play virtual racing games, they use visual environmental information on the game screen to understand the rules within the environments. In contrast, a state-of-the-art realistic racing game AI agent that outperforms human players does not use image-based environmental information but the compact and precise measurements provided by the environment. In this paper, a vision-based control algorithm is proposed and compared with human player performances under the same conditions in realistic racing scenarios using Gran Turismo Sport (GTS), which is known as a high-fidelity realistic racing simulator. In the proposed method, the environmental information that constitutes part of the observations in conventional state-of-the-art methods is replaced with feature representations extracted from game screen images. We demonstrate that the proposed method performs expert human-level vehicle control under high-speed driving scenarios even with game screen images as high-dimensional inputs. Additionally, it outperforms the built-in AI in GTS in a time trial task, and its score places it among the top 10% approximately 28,000 human players.

Professional race-car drivers can execute extreme overtaking maneuvers. However, existing algorithms for autonomous overtaking either rely on simplified assumptions about the vehicle dynamics or try to solve expensive trajectory-optimization problems online. When the vehicle approaches its physical limits, existing model-based controllers struggle to handle highly nonlinear dynamics, and cannot leverage the large volume of data generated by simulation or real-world driving. To circumvent these limitations, we propose a new learning-based method to tackle the autonomous overtaking problem. We evaluate our approach in the popular car racing game Gran Turismo Sport, which is known for its detailed modeling of various cars and tracks. By leveraging curriculum learning, our approach leads to faster convergence as well as increased performance compared to vanilla reinforcement learning. As a result, the trained controller outperforms the built-in model-based game AI and achieves comparable overtaking performance with an experienced human driver.

Over the past few decades, research teams worldwide have developed machine learning and deep learning techniques that can achieve human-comparable performance on a variety of tasks. Some of these models were also trained to play renowned board or videogames, such as the Ancient Chinese game Go or Atari arcade games, in order to further assess their capabilities and performance. Researchers at University of Zurich and SONY AI Zurich have recently tested the performance of a deep reinforcement learning-based approach that was trained to play Gran Turismo Sport, the renowned car racing video game developed by Polyphony Digital and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Their findings, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, further highlight the potential of deep learning techniques for controlling cars in simulated environments. "Autonomous driving at high speed is a challenging task that requires generating fast and precise actions even when the vehicle is approaching its physical limits," Yunlong Song, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

Autonomous car racing raises fundamental robotics challenges such as planning minimum-time trajectories under uncertain dynamics and controlling the car at its friction limits. In this project, we consider the task of autonomous car racing in the top-selling car racing game Gran Turismo Sport. Gran Turismo Sport is known for its detailed physics simulation of various cars and tracks. Our approach makes use of maximum-entropy deep reinforcement learning and a new reward design to train a sensorimotor policy to complete a given race track as fast as possible. We evaluate our approach in three different time trial settings with different cars and tracks. Our results show that the obtained controllers not only beat the built-in non-player character of Gran Turismo Sport, but also outperform the fastest known times in a dataset of personal best lap times of over 50,000 human drivers.

Jaguar has revealed its next electric car, the Vision Gran Turismo Coupé, but speed freaks won't be able to put their foot on the pedals. Described as a'hypercar', the Coupé will be powered by a 750kW engine with 1,000 horsepower, capable of going from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than two seconds. It will also be capable of reaching top speeds of more than 200mph. It will also feature a futuristic holographic dashboard display that can adapt the information it shows to drivers depending on where they are and what they're doing. The only way to drive it is in the video game, Gran Turismo according to a new report from The Verge.

While we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, we're now fully onboard with the sale frenzy that accompanies it (even if we don't like to admit it to ourselves). If you're in the market for a new piece of tech but don't fancy wading out onto the High Street, we've got you covered. As always, if you spot anything that we might have missed, drop us a note in the comments below and we'll add it to our list as soon as possible. Some will be daily deals, so move quickly. They are targeted at Brits mind you, so we're avoiding anything that forces you to pay in dollars (you can find that here), Euros or any other (probably stronger) currency.

Polyphony Digital founder and Gran Turismo series creator Yazunori Yamauchi took to the official PlayStation blog early Tuesday to announce that he and the team working behind "Gran Turismo Sport" have decided to push the release date of the game back to next year. Announced 10 months ago at Paris Game Week, "Gran Turismo Sport" is Polyphony and Sony Interactive Entertainment's next installment after its successful "Gran Turismo 6," and Yamauchi stated in his post that many fans have high expectations for the game. Unfortunately, instead of its anticipated November release, the game's release date has been delayed until 2017. Yamauchi indicated in his post that the reason for the delay is because his team still needs more time to perfect "Gran Turismo Sport" and in order for them to ensure that the gaming experience is not compromised once the game arrives. The professional racing driver also admitted that they are after the high quality features that they would be able to deliver well through the cutting-edge technologies they are using.