Gran Turismo 7's new AI might be able to beat the game's best players
Gran Turismo 7 developer Polyphony Digital, in partnership with Sony AI, has unleashed a new artificial intelligence named Sophy upon the game.
Gran Turismo 7's Sophy AI is designed to give even the most prolific racers a run for their money. Sophy has been trained to learn from the PS5 racing sim's playerbase in order to create an AI agent that feels like you're racing against real players (thanks, Venture Beat(opens in new tab)).
Sophy is available to race against in Gran Turismo 7 right now, albeit in a limited capacity. Players must access the new 'Race Together' mode from the main menu, and you're currently limited to just a handful of tracks at varying difficulty levels.
The mode is only available for a limited time, too, from now until the end of March. However, Polyphony has confirmed it'll take on feedback from this session to improve Sophy and will hold multiple trials in the game throughout the year.
«Prior AI, which has been mostly the same for the last 20 years, tries to follow a line and a particular trajectory. So it’s trying to hit certain speeds at certain points,» says Sophy project lead Peter Wurman. «And it’s very predictable. And it’s not nearly fast enough for really good (human) drivers.»
There's much truth to Wurman's words here. The best racing games typically scale AI based on difficulty level. But eventually, the best players of any given racing game will know the AI from inside out. That makes them fairly manageable even at the hardest level, and knowing various quirks to exploit can make racing against more standard AI even easier.
Sophy is clearly a very ambitious project, and making use of a neural network-trained AI is certainly something new in the realm of racing games. The closest thing I can
Read more on techradar.com
