A team of researchers at Sony AI have used deep reinforcement learning to teach an artificial intelligence to play
Gran Turismo at a world-class level. While previous experiments
have taught AI how to drive very fast, this is the first time that one has learned to actually race. And to prove it, the AI beat some of the world's best
GT players in head-to-head competition, as described in
a new paper published in Nature this week.
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Learning how to get around the track only required a few hours of training, and within a day or two, GT Sophy was better than about 95 percent of
GT: Sport players.
After 10 days—45,000 driving hours in total—GT Sophy "achieved superhuman time-trial performance on all three tracks." In fact, the humans were only close to GT Sophy's performance on the Maggiore track, where its consistent lap times were about equal to the single best recorded human lap.