A few months ago, Polyphony Digital, in collaboration with Sony, deployed the AI for Gran Turismo 7. The latter, called Sophy, has made great strides as it is now able to beat the best human pilots. Nothing really new so far, since all the players who completed a few laps on the track were slower than the drivers controlled by the game thanks to often indirect means such as increasing speed or improving control. Sophy does not use these vulgar cheats, but it still has some advantages over poor humans like us: knowing the location of other cars on the track, large amounts of telemetry data, a much wider field of view (a real plus for predicting your routes)…
The important news here is that Sophie fought on par with the humans and outperformed the best of them 94% of the time; the data was calculated after 130,000 laps of the circuit. During the competition, she only had the data that the players benefited from on the game’s HUD screen, which displays, among other things, the car’s speed, a map of the track, the rev counter… And she only saw what was displayed on the screen. But let’s point out that during the learning phase, Sophie had access to the various data we talked about earlier.
We are not that bad
But let's reassure ourselves as much as we can. If Sophie can give Lewis Hamilton a hard time, it's only for a timed test session, with no rivals on the track. Racing with other cars requires adapting to new situations very quickly. The large number of decisions that will have to be made in a very short time still poses major problems for Sophie. However, it's not impossible that she can make significant progress very quickly to compete, in the race, with the best players in Gran Turismo 7 and without having any advantage over the latter.
