An artificial intelligence can beat the best human players at the racing video game Gran Turismo 7 using only the images and information that players can see.
In 2022, researchers at Sony AI created GT Sophy, a driving AI that could beat the best human players at Gran Turismo Sport, a previous version of the game. However, the AI had access to information that human players didn鈥檛, such as real-time information of other cars and the layout of the racetrack beyond the driver鈥檚 view.
Now, at Sony AI and his colleagues have trained an AI model to outrace humans using only the information that a player might see on the screen.
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Subramanian and his team trained the model by rewarding the AI for driving faster and penalising it for veering off course or slowing down. In this training phase, the AI was given both on-screen images and information not normally available to players, like the course layout. Then, once the model had been trained, the AI only used screen images to race around the track.
In time trials, where the aim is to drive around a track with no other cars as fast as possible, the AI drove faster than the best human driver from more than 130,000 online races in at least 94 per cent of the test laps. It also performed comparably to GT Sophy.
But racing with other drivers on the track at the same time would be a much tougher challenge, says at King鈥檚 College London. 鈥淭he research still has a long way to go before it can play a real racing game,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his AI has only been trained to race on its own, with no cars to bump into or avoid, but it鈥檚 still an impressive performance.鈥�
The AI would require a lot of retraining to be able play a wide variety of racing games rather than just one, like a human, but it is a step towards that goal, says at the Institute of Digital Games in Malta.
arXiv
