At Essex, we have for some time been working on
automatically
learning how to race cars in simulation. It turns out
that a combination of evolutionary algorithms and neural
networks can learn how to beat all humans in racing games,
and also come up with some quite interesting, novel
behaviours, which might one day make their way into
commercial racing games. While this is simulation, the race
is now on for the real thing - we are setting up
a
competition for AI developers, where the goal is to win a
race between model cars on real tracks. As the cars will
be around half a meter long, the cost of participating will
be a fraction of that for the famous DARPA Grand Challenge,
whereas the challenges will be similar in terms of computer
vision and AI.
