It took 3 years to build an "unbeatable" racing AI for the wildest driving game in the world

gamesradar.com:

After three years, a Trackmania player's quest to build an "unbeatable" racing AI finally appears to be at an end.

If you're not familiar with Trackmania, it's a pretty wild take on racing games, focused largely on time trials through user-created tracks filled with absurd corners, corkscrews, and other hyper-unrealistic obstacles. I know it primarily for weird custom servers with chill vibes and pirated music playlists, but it's got a robust driving model that makes it a popular competitive pastime, too.

The fact that it's all about time trials and custom tracks also means that Trackmania is a terrific testbed for AI training - at a minimum, it inspired a player who goes by Yosh to start building an AI that could beat his times. He's been running a YouTube channel documenting the AI training process for some time, and three years later he's finally done it. (Thanks, PC Gamer.)

To start, Yosh built a simple track made of simple curves, a bit like a gently sloped waveform. Through numerous iterations, the AI pretty quickly learned how to complete the track with a decent time, but it was still well behind Yosh's own times. "So, like my AI," Yosh explains, "I entered a trial and error loop of guessing what to fix, re-running the training, and waiting to see if it got better. Usually it didn't. This was a painful process."

Eventually, that trial and error process paid off - the AI beat Yosh's time, and kept getting better, shaving more and more fractions of a second off the record. But that was just a simple track, so Yosh built a new training ground in the form of a massive maze without any boundaries. Here, the AI took about 35 hours of training in order to beat Yosh's time - which isn't bad when you consider that it's