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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

It is a hard question to answer. It’s like asking if more programmers on a project will allow it to be completed faster with higher quality. Ya, theoretically they could, in practice not likely. More sensors are like more programmers, theoretically they can be safer and more effective, but in practice they won’t be. Sensor fusion is as hard a problem as scaling up a software team.

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It is not a hard question to answer at all. LIDAR will make a self driving car safer, period. There is a lot of research to back this up.

LIDAR can be safer than an optical system, I can believe that. LIDAR and an optical system being safer than either alone without a lot of extra complexity: maybe not.

> More sensors are like more programmers

More programmers are like having more testicles, theoretically they should enable you to have more kids, but in practice bootleneck are elsewhere.

Both your and my reasoning by comparison is equally valid

That isn't it though. It isn't like pumping a baby out in 1 month using 9 women. No, the problem is the fusion of too much information that varies substantially. They have completely different views of the world and you can't just lerp them together.

I bring up the programmers working on a project example just to illustrate how more isn't always better even if it theoretically can be.

I mean yeah, but it is a friggin ton heavy object moving at high speed controlled by a computer. Having another kind of sensor system to cross-check might be the reasonable thing to have, even if you happen to make it work well in 99% of the cases just with optics — the issue is that the other 1% kill people.

Your optical system can be good as heck till a bug hits it directly on the lense coving an important frontal area and make it behave weirdly.

Not more sensors, different sensors.

In your metaphor it's like asking if you should have project managers as well as engineers on your project. And Tesla has decided that having only engineers allows them to focusing on having the best engineers. And they avoid the distraction of having to manage different types of employees.

Different sensors are even worse for sensor fusion. Actually, it only applies to different sensors, incorporating different signals with different strengths and weaknesses into a model that is actually better and not worse, is difficult.

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