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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Not the answer you're looking for, but motor racing and simulations of it.

Sounds counter intuitive, but despite doing fast laps when on the circuit alone, even the best AI racers have difficulty surviving a race distance in close pack racing without crashing.

Roborace, the autonomous racing league in development has barely managed to put two cars on track and doing an overtake safely. A lot of money and state of the art research has gone into this.

I expect that AI will be able to beat humans on the (simulated) race track in a decade or two but we aren't there yet.

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I get that this is true of real cars, but is it really true of simulated cars? Can you share an example?

There are no racing simulators or even games that have reasonable AI opponents that don't cheat.

I, mid-tier sim racer, have no chance against good AI in hotlapping on track in some popular sims, but all of them either yield or cause a crash that would take them to the stewards (or grave) when racing for position on the same piece of track.

Pro racing team have excellent sims these days but they don't have AI opponents.

Do you have any particular reason to believe that the "AI" you refer to are sophisticated ML models built over the sim, rather than hand crafted bots. You say "don't cheat" which makes me think you're referring to the bots included in the sim. Because an AI that's not built into the game shouldn't have any way to cheat.

Forgive this comparison, but the ai drivers in mario kart games also cheat, but aren't particularly representative of current state ML tech. There's likely no ML involved in them at all. There's not much in the way of actual attempts to do this with ML either so it's not proof either way (especially on new untrained courses).

No, they are not sophisticated ML models. Such things don't exist in this space as far as I know.

The ones that cheat are in racing games. The hardcore sims that have AI bots don't usually cheat, and they are the ones that are fast by themselves but hopeless and/or dangerous in a pack.

Roborace is the only place where this kind of research has been done, and after many years and millions of dollars they're past their first baby steps, but still learning to walk before they can run.

When you say "don't cheat" do you mean "are subject to the same physics as human drivers" or "don't engage in illegal overtakes / maneuvers"?

Wait, I thought autonomous cars are almost out. You ruined my excitement.

Autonomous cars can solve the problem of close-pack driving by avoiding close-packs. That's a great way to lose a race though...

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