A.I. has mastered ‘Gran Turismo’ — and one autonomous car designer is taking note

Now, an A.I. program has dethroned the best human players in the professional esports world of Gran Turismo Sport.

In a paper published recently in the science journal Nature, researchers at a team led by Sony A.I. detailed how they created a program called Gran Turismo Sophy, which was able to win a race in Tokyo last October.

Peter Wurman is the head of the team on the GT Sophy project and said they didn’t manually program the A.I. to be good at racing. Instead, they trained it on race after race, running multiple simulations of the game using a computer system connected to roughly 1,000 PlayStation 4 consoles…

“It takes about an hour for the agent to learn to drive around a track. It takes about four hours to become about as good as the average human driver. And it takes 24 to 48 hours to be as good as the top 1% of the drivers who play the game.”

And after another 10 days, it can finally run toe-to-toe with the very best humanity has to offer.