Sony may be gearing up for an artificial intelligence breakthrough with its racing-focused AI, according to the company's new blog post. The so-called Gran Turismo Sophy is a dedicated AI agent that's been purpose-built to be able to go toe-to-toe with professional sim players, and it's already showing promising results.
Specifically, Gran Turismo Sophy seems to be Sony's attempt to revolutionize racing against AI drivers. The potentially ground-breaking AI was revealed as part of Sony and Polyphony Digital's special Race Together event, and the companies claim that Sophy is more than able to hold its own. Perhaps more importantly, it can do so without using rubberbanding and the usual array of catch-up systems that racing games often use.
What makes Gran Turismo Sophy particularly interesting is that it's quite unlike most other experimental gaming AIs. Unlike, say, the Tetris AI that plays too efficiently, Sophy has been trained from the ground up to take three major considerations into account: physical realism, real-time race tactics, and sports etiquette. The end result is a "bot" that - according to Sony and Polyphony - plays competitively without having to resort to cheating, as racing AIs usually do.
According to Sony's blog post, Gran Turismo Sophy has been trained using a deep reinforcement learning system that leverages SIE's cloud network. Following its training, Sophy could drive aggressively but fairly, control its vehicles naturally without breaking game physics, and optimize racing lines for realistic overtaking techniques. Perhaps more impressively in regard to contemporary video game AI development, Sophy also ended up handily beating the world's best Gran Turismo Sport players in two separate events.
Sony's goal seems to be to deliver a highly competitive, yet fair racing AI that could behave like an actual player in moment-to-moment gameplay. As Sony's recent acquisition of Bungie has shown, the company doesn't shy away from investments that might take a good long while to pay off. The potential for an AI like Sophy to take off is downright immense, but it's going to take time before regular players see any of these developments in commercial projects.
Indeed, it's highly unlikely that Sophy will be a part of the Gran Turismo 7 gameplay loop anytime soon. Polyphony Digital and Sony did promise to explore potential avenues for the implementation of Sophy into future Gran Turismo titles, with the implication that the project is still in its early stages, and that there's much work to be done before it could be used in a practical sense.
Source: Sony