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The racetrack is the ultimate test of driving skill, managing power, traction, and braking to produce the fastest times. Now BBC reports that engineers at Stanford University have raced their souped-up Audi TTS dubbed ‘Shelley’ on the racetrack at speeds above 120 mph. When they time tested it against David Vodden, the racetrack CEO and amateur touring class champion, the driverless race car was faster by 0.4 of a second. "We’ve been trying to develop cars that perform like the very best human drivers,” says Professor Chris Gerdes who tested Shelley at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California. “We’ve got the point of being fairly comparable to an expert driver in terms of our ability to drive around the track.”
To get the cars up to speed, the Stanford team studied drivers, even attaching electrodes to their heads to monitor brain activity in the hope of learning which neural circuits are working during difficult manoeuvres. Scientists were intrigued to find that during the most complex tasks, the experts used less brain power. They appeared to be acting on instinct and muscle memory rather than using judgement as a computer program would. Although there was previously very little difference between the path a professional driver takes around the course and the route charted by Shelley's algorithms until now the very best human drivers were still faster around the track, if just by a few seconds. Now the researchers predict that within the next 15 years, cars will drive with the skill of Michael Schumacher. What remains to be seen is how Shelly will do when running fender to fender with real human race drivers.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday February 24 2015, @06:58PM
No, computers have judgement just like people, it's just a different kind of judgement.
Let me begin by demonstrating a point with facial recognition. Computers now have gotten pretty good at facial recognition, but they still make mistakes, labeling some faces as non-faces and some non-faces and faces. Humans, hey, they must be a lot better at facial recognition, right? Except people see faces in non-faces all the time (face in toast, face in mirror, face on side of mountain, face in clouds, etc.), and I'd imagine there are times when people fail to recognize faces as well (ignoring special cases like prosopagnosia).
Humans are biased; they think only human judgement counts as judgement, or that human judgement is somehow more infallible than machine judgement, or animal judgement, or scientific judgement, or statistical judgement, etc. But that's not true; in some cases it may be that human judgement is superior, but in most cases it's not. We humans are royally bad at judging; it doesn't help that most, if not all, of our decisions are made spontaneously and only justified logically after the fact.
A computer may make an error in driving judgement: it detects a person where there is none, swerving and putting their rider at risk. A human also makes errors in driving judgement: rubbernecking at accidents, new construction, new road signs, a hot woman, misjudging safe driving speed or current driving conditions, misjudging distances, misjudging other driver behavior.
Now let us ask, which makes more errors resulting in more net cost (damage)?
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