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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I would like to live in a world with autonomous vehicles that were trained in Grand Theft Auto.

I don't think anyone is thinking of training on GTA then reusing it on a real car. It's just a convenient way to work out the algorithms and architecture in a controlled way that might then work out with the real world data.

But I do think GTA's unrealistic physics engine[1] will hurt it for simulating the cases we care most about (accidents, lost of traction, etc)

[1] GTA is a regular submission on /r/GamePhysics which collects funny game physics glitches: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamePhysics/search?q=GTA&sort=top&r... https://www.reddit.com/r/GamePhysics/search?q=GTAV&sort=top&... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy332GE6lcMVP612IUs7ODw/vid...

exactly, i saw a similar complaint as to the gp's in a thread about working with classical computing to simulate quantum computing

my argument then was 'imagine prototyping on a machine that needs to be kept at 17millikelvin'

here the argument is 'imagine prototyping on a two ton missile traveling at lethal speeds through highly populated areas'

Wildly unrealistic vehicle physics is core DNA for GTA and related games. I remember playing True Crime: Streets of LA back in the days, where you could do doughnuts in a city bus. It was amazing.

Sounds a bit crazy until you look at it from the perspective of being able to visually observe how an AI driver would react to erratic behavior like pedestrians suddenly running onto the road or conditions like gunfire, accidents, etc. I think this is just a small step in the positive direction of AI development.

It's surprising how scriptable the game is. For example, the car I train the AI with is set to the least aggressive driving style which stops for rabbits crossing the road :) Also, all violence against the player is disabled.

This is a modified version of GTA where the behavior of people is non-violent.

Maybe the most unrealistic part about the simulator, then.

Why?

They're implying that lack of road rage makes it unrealistic.

Don't you want your self driving car to be able to get away from the cops?

Mul-ti-pass?

I guess trianing/testing the training might work well though

If GTA's physics model is realistic enough, you could train a model in that world "safely", then use the model with transfer learning (perhaps with another dataset from the "real world" - either homegrown or pre-existing) to "fine tune" to the real world. At least, that's one possibility.

There might not be a better (virtual) alternative. Remember billions get sunk into these games. Don't think you'll get the same $$ for dedicated training environments.

I am sure and I do not.

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