GT Sophy: Sony’s new AI beats the best drivers in the world on Gran Turismo

Sony said on Wednesday that it had created an artificial intelligence agent called Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy) that was able to beat the world’s best drivers in the PlayStation racing simulation game Gran Turismo.

To prepare GT Sophy for the game, various Sony units contributed basic AI research, a hyper-realistic real-world racing simulator and infrastructure for large-scale AI training, the company said in a statement.

The AI ​​first raced against the top four Gran Turismo drivers in July, learned from the race, and outplayed the human drivers in another race in October.

“It took about 20 PlayStations running simultaneously for about 10-12 days to train GT Sophy to run from zero to superhuman level,” said Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and leader of the team that designed the AI.

While AI has been used to defeat humans in chess, Mahjong and Go games, Sony said the difficulty in mastering racing car driving was due to the many decisions that had to be made. in real time.

Sony rival Microsoft, which recently bought Activision for $69 billion (roughly Rs. 5,17,035 crore), is using games to improve AI by providing new challenges for AI models to solve.

Gran Turismo, a racing simulation video game, debuted in 1997 and sold over 80 million units.

Sony wants to apply the learnings to other PlayStation games.

“There are a lot of games that pose different challenges to the AI ​​and we can’t wait to start working on those issues,” he said.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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