Sony’s Gran Turismo AI thrashes the world’s best drivers

polygon.com:

Sony’s brand-new artificial intelligence laboratory revealed its first breakthrough technology on Wednesday — GT Sophy, an AI capable of superhuman reactions and airtight racing strategy to beat the most skilled human drivers. It’s the cover star of this week’s edition of the science journal Nature, but don’t go looking for it at launch in Gran Turismo 7 next month.

GT Sophy, Sony says, is an achievement not so much because the AI can evaluate and execute complicated decisions with lightning speed, nor because it can master the racing lines of three Gran Turismo Sport tracks down to the millimeter. Motorsport, noted Michael Spranger, Sony AI’s chief operating officer, also relies upon etiquette — hard and aggressive driving that still plays fair and observes the spirit of rules as much, if not more than, the letter of what is legally allowed.

Coding an AI in a conventional racing video game to drive hard but fair is a tremendously difficult process because of the vagaries of racing etiquette. Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of Gran Turismo and chief executive of its studio, Polyphony Digital, said that GT Sophy was developed not only to show respect to competitors, but to behave in a way that human drivers would respect its performance.

“The agent should be a friend, a comrade, a buddy to human beings, an agent that people can feel sympathy with,” Yamauchi said, through a translator. “Also, the agent can stimulate the emotion of people, so that the agent and human beings can mutually respect each other.”

In a racing demonstration following a half-hour presentation, four GT Sophy bots raced against four Gran Turismo esports competitors — Tomoaki Yamanaka (2021 TGR GT Cup champion), Takuma Miyazono (2020 Nations Cup world