Sony AI, Polyphony Digital, and Sony Interactive Entertainment revealed a “superhuman artificial intelligence agent that can compete against the top human Gran Turismo drivers.”

We have previously discussed Sony AI’s teasing of the announcement. Still, we now have more details, confirming that the project is indeed tied to Gran Turismo: “Gran Turismo Sophy is an autonomous artificial intelligence agent trained to utilize a novel deep reinforcement learning platform developed in collaboration between Sony AI, Polyphony Digital, and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Each group contributed to the project’s success by bringing expertise in fundamental artificial intelligence research and development, a hyper-realistic real-world racing simulator, and a massive-scale artificial intelligence training infrastructure.

Gran Turismo Sophy was trained to master the driving skills needed to compete with the world’s best championship-level drivers. Race car control: a deep understanding of car dynamics, racing lines, and precision manoeuvres to conquer challenging tracks. Racing tactics: split-second decision-making skills in response to rapidly evolving racing situations. Gran Turismo Sophy showed mastery of tactics including slipstream passing, crossover passes and even some defensive manoeuvres such as blocking. Racing etiquette: essential for fair play, Gran Turismo Sophy had to conform to highly refined but imprecisely specified sportsmanship rules, including avoiding at-fault collisions and respecting opponent driving lines.

Sony AI and its partners built a novel deep reinforcement learning approach and platform since no existing combination of algorithms and infrastructure could solve this challenge. Mastering the complex sport of race car driving in the highly realistic driving simulator Gran Turismo Sport represents a breakthrough in AI. As such, it is published today in Nature in an article titled Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning,” the announcement reads.

You can read more about Gran Turismo Sophy at the Sony AI blog, Sony Interactive Entertainment blog, or Polyphony Digital blog.

Kenichiro Yoshida, Sony Group Corporation president and CEO, says the following in the video below: “Hello everyone. Today, I’m very excited to share the announcement of Sony AI’s new game AI agent—Gran Turismo Sophy. We established Sony AI in April 2020 as a fundamental research and development organization to accelerate Sony’s transformation into an AI-powered, creative entertainment company. Over the past two years, researchers and engineers at Sony AI have been working closely with Polyphony Digital, the creators of Gran Turismo, and the cloud gaming team at Sony Interactive Entertainment. Together they created a superhuman AI agent that can compete against the top human Gran Turismo drivers.

This group collaboration, which is featured on the cover of the latest edition of Nature, is truly unique to Sony. With Sony being a creative entertainment company, we built this game AI agent for gamers. I’m also enthusiastic about this project because it demonstrates our potential to effectively utilize the PlayStation cloud gaming infrastructure for mass scale AI training purposes. Gran Turismo Sophy is the first significant project announcement from Sony AI. I hope you are excited as I am about more news to come from Sony AI in the future – and to deliver on Sony’s Purpose to fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology.”

So when will it show up in Gran Turismo 7?

Source: Gematsu