
Formula E to feature autonomous car racing - nyamhap
http://current-e.com/chatter/autonomous-car-racing-comes-to-formula-e/
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kayoone
If it weren't for regulations, i am sure F1 would already be like this or
close to it. Compared to public traffic, race tracks are quite easy to master
for AI. They had active suspension systems and traction control in the early
nineties where the driver was already reduced to mostly just pushing the pedal
and steering but the FIA banned most of those driver aids because real human
driving skill and error is just more exciting to the general public.

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eterm
Well yeah, it's not much of a sport if there's no one left driving.

(Some might say it's not much of a sport anyway, but it seems popular.)

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kayoone
> Some might say it's not much of a sport anyway, but it seems popular

Yeah, that is another argument. Not many people understand that driving a F1
car is hugely physically challenging though and drivers need to be in top
shape. Us mere mortals would be exhausted after 2 laps and could not hold our
head straight for even one high speed corner.

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semi-extrinsic
Never mind that we wouldn't have the technique and balls to be able to drive
around one high speed corner.

Watch Richard Hammond, who's spent more time than 99.9% of us driving fast
cars round racetracks, spend an entire day and not getting it quite right:
[https://youtu.be/EGUZJVY-sHo](https://youtu.be/EGUZJVY-sHo)

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bitL
So who is going to be interested in motorsports when in 15+ years AI beats the
best human drivers? Not only the races will be boring (cheering for an
automaton Lewiz Hamiltobot?), but all humans would look like total losers.

The "easy" way for AI is to record all telemetry of a super fast human lap and
then tweak it with machine learning for subsequent runs. No human is going to
be 100% consistent all the time.

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jacquesm
A robotic car could do something no car driven by a human could ever do: drive
without fear of losing their life. Which would allow it to take a lot more
risk. Humans continuously balance risk and caution, with racing and other
dangerous sports having the 'risk' portion of the equation defined as 'you
die'. For a robotic car such a risk would be non-existent.

~~~
bitL
Sure, but would you watch it for getting adrenaline rush from racing? At some
point it would end up as who has the best "non-linear controller" wins (i.e.
human is your non-linear controller now), then all of them will have it and
all the tweaks will be in some optimization techniques and different objective
functions.

And your objective function would have to feature penalty for "killing
yourself" (well, do you want to rebuild your car after each turn? I guess
not...), so I would expect the cars will be actually pretty slow due to this
initially, like Google's own.

Human motorsports face the problem that all physical records were shattered
and humans already crossed the edge of their abilities (i.e. driving 250mph on
the ovals is the limit before drivers pass out)[1]. So yes, there could be
something interesting for a normal human to see that robotic cars suddenly
could push 300, 350, 400mph etc. But what would this do to human motorsports?
Relegate them to 'meh' category, basically killing the whole sport as humans
would look like kids from a kindergarten comparing to robots.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Firehawk_600](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Firehawk_600)

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olau
Awesome!

Perhaps this could end up in a place where the focus is on the cars and the
technical performance, rather than human driver skill. For those of us who are
more interested in engineering challenges than the celebrity driver of the
day.

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justincormack
Oh no it will be about programmer skill, with celebrity coders.

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wycx
I could not find a video online, but some may remember the post race press
conference when Eddie Irvine (driving for Jaguar) thanked the guy at the
factory that wrote the launch control software for his great start.

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userbinator
I think this will be quite popular with those who like watching races for the
crashes, but also don't want people to get injured.

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akiselev
Oh god there's going to be so many crashes... at first. Then it will catch up
to EA's racing AI and become the first casualty in the war against skynet.

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agumonkey
The spread of self driving vehicles (and even drones) is probably an
'accelerating returns' of some sort. Such context will act as a beautiful test
bed for complex and limit cases. Unless the results end up locked it will
backfire positively on in-society driving.

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quanticle
I would love to see a rule where the software that each team uses has to be
open-sourced at the end of the season, both to ensure competitive parity
between well funded and not-so-well-funded teams, and also to ensure that any
breakthroughs spread quickly from the world of racing to the world of "normal"
cars.

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pbhjpbhj
It would be interesting to have a stock car version with software open before
the race. Teams could try exploits, interfere with GPS, drive evasively, etc.
- arguably this will lead to greater hardening techniques, ability to cope
with crashes of all types.

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copperx
That's great! It's so obvious that it raises the question of why didn't
anybody do this before?

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tobylane
The whole FE formula is still barely doable, they change cars half way because
the batteries run out, can't be charged on the go, can't have batteries
swapped out. It's planned to be this way for another four years.

I imagine many other parts of the current, and of the AI formula, are equally
only just possible now.

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nyamhap
Perhaps initially races will probably go for the 25-30min that one set of
batteries lasts

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Spare_account
Could we perhaps go one step further and simulate the vehicle and the
racetrack entirely? SimRacer

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reitanqild
Totally different imo, see my first answer as for why (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640665)
)

