Gran Turismo Sophy: Sony AI x Polyphony Digital

[hawkeyez]

If she's ever used ingame (likely she will not be) she's obviously not going to just be thrown in as is. That'd be asinine even by PD standards.

Sony AI is only pitting her against GTWS drivers to play up how impressive her tech is, a "look what we're capable of creating" type of deal - it's in no way representative of future updates or implementations.

Perhaps but what circuit experience was that which became a meme, you think such and such a game is hard? try sector 4 on whatever track it was on gt7. I tried that one like 50 to 100 times still don’t know how I beat it because I was out of control and sliding but it was the only way.

 

[Jordan]

This is the discussion thread for an article on GTPlanet:

Hands-On with Gran Turismo Sophy, GT7’s New Artificial Intelligence System​

At the recent Gran Turismo World Series Finals in Monaco, I had the chance to be one of the first humans to race against Gran Turismo Sophy, the radical new artificial intelligence system developed by Polyphony Digital and Sony AI...

 

[Samus]

To be clear, Sophy still has a ways to go before its released to the public.


Although its driving model is already at a high level — it only made one odd move that I was able to see — its integration with GT7 is clearly still in development. My Sophy opponent was running on its own PlayStation 5 console and we were driving in a private LAN race. Nevertheless, the most difficult part of Sophy’s development appears to be behind the Sony AI team. Now they can work on refining the model and collaborating with Polyphony Digital to figure out how to best introduce it to Gran Turismo’s player base.

Disappointing, but not at all surprising. It's going to be course maker all over again, shown off as one thing and eventually arrives WAY too late as another.

 

[deviln3]

Likely won't see Sophy in GT7 but the potential of racing an AI that will actually try to avoid contact and make a clean pass will be amazing. Maybe we wont have chase the rabbit races.

 

[Veinz]

It’s interesting how it was on it’s own PS5. This is looking very good.

 

[Boltar]

The real thrill is racing other people.

 

[hawkeyez]

The real thrill is racing other people.

Nothing can beat it but the single player races are pretty lame. Even when I was working my way through the main cafe menus most of it was just meh. It’s weird though there was a couple races or tournaments that weren’t too bad and actually fun. If online multiplayer lobbies paid out closer to even the midrange payout races in single player I don’t think I would have even finished the cafe menus or at least really taken my time finishing them.

 

[Veinz]

I agree that you can’t beat racing real people, but most public lobbies in any racing game are pretty chaotic. This ai looks faster and cleaner than most players if you just want to hop on and race.

 

[XSquareStickIt]

This is the discussion thread for an article on GTPlanet:

Hands-On with Gran Turismo Sophy, GT7’s New Artificial Intelligence System​

At the recent Gran Turismo World Series Finals in Monaco, I had the chance to be one of the first humans to race against Gran Turismo Sophy, the radical new artificial intelligence system developed by Polyphony Digital and Sony AI...

From what I understand reading this article, it sounds to me like Sophy has superhuman speed, with its only restraint being etiquette and safety. Once it finds an opening to pass a human driver, the player can no longer hope to catch it again as it simply waltzes away with its inhuman pace. It makes me ask the question that was acknowledged in the article: "How is that fun?" Assuming Sophy makes it into GT7, where the player almost always starts last in campaign mode, is that to say that we'll never even have a chance to line up side by side with a car driven by Sophy?

For Sophy to serve as an AI in a racing game, I assume it would have to learn a given player's pace, and then closely match it as they improve over time. Sophy would also have to be prone to mistakes, prone to "emotion" sometimes, like anger and fear. How does it react to a little rubbing, or a flat out punt from the player? Has it been trained to recover a car from a slide? Can it handle changing track conditions with standing and drying water? Until these questions are answered, I can't see Sophy ever being relevant to us, the players of GT7 who constantly suffer oblivious shunts from the brain–dead AI.

As a "sparring partner" that helps one improve, yes, it does sound like the perfect tool. I just don't see it being the savior of GT7 like I so badly wish it could be.

 

[Bornhall]

Likely won't see Sophy in GT7 but the potential of racing an AI that will actually try to avoid contact and make a clean pass will be amazing. Maybe we wont have chase the rabbit races.

Wouldn't be at all surprised if we get to see Sophy in GT7, to be honest. BUT, I do think that it will be limited to single, specific events, with one-make on a specific track. The thing seems to be that they are, at this point, training the model on a specific car and a specific track – meaning the number of combinations is pretty staggering.

With "thousands of laps of training" (paraphrasing here), it will take a while to accomplish a model that either is a "generic" model that can drive several different cars on many tracks, or a model for each combination. The former is likely what they would want, but is harder to achieve, while the latter is easier to achieve but takes more time to train (well, the combinations causes that).

But, as I've said before, the training is the processing intensive part, not the actual model that runs on the console in the end.

 

[hawkeyez]

Am I the only one that thinks project cars had decent AI? You could increase difficulty by percentage and aggressiveness. Is it really that difficult to do?

Sometimes it took a little time to dial in, you’d set it and blow them away but it wasn’t that long where you’d find ok I guess on this track and this car category I’m about an 87% for a good race that I can still win if I race well.

Even if we could put some AI onto lobbies just to fill the group out a bit would be nice. I don’t even care if they are dumb AI And more of an obstacle even if you are lapping them.

 

[Vspectra]

I hope someone will ask Kaz at the next round table if Sophy will mean Polyphony will finally do away with Chase The Rabbit rolling starts and rely more on proper standing starts in the single player career races.

 

[platocplx]

Wouldn't be at all surprised if we get to see Sophy in GT7, to be honest. BUT, I do think that it will be limited to single, specific events, with one-make on a specific track. The thing seems to be that they are, at this point, training the model on a specific car and a specific track – meaning the number of combinations is pretty staggering.

With "thousands of laps of training" (paraphrasing here), it will take a while to accomplish a model that either is a "generic" model that can drive several different cars on many tracks, or a model for each combination. The former is likely what they would want, but is harder to achieve, while the latter is easier to achieve but takes more time to train (well, the combinations causes that).

But, as I've said before, the training is the processing intensive part, not the actual model that runs on the console in the end.

It’s not restricted to the car type. the recent sophy race was different from the AMG in a previous race. I can see it easily trained for all car types. If you read the nature article about it it details all the training its way more flexible than what you are saying.

We demonstrate GT Sophy by competing against top human drivers on three car and track combinations that posed different racing challenges. The car used on the first track, Dragon Trail Seaside (Seaside), was a high-performance road vehicle. On the second track, Lago Maggiore GP (Maggiore), the vehicle was equivalent to the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) GT3 class of race cars. The third and final race took place on the Circuit de la Sarthe (Sarthe), famous as the home of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. This race featured the Red Bull X2019 Competition race car, which can reach speeds in excess of 300 km h−1.

Am I the only one that thinks project cars had decent AI? You could increase difficulty by percentage and aggressiveness. Is it really that difficult to do?

Sometimes it took a little time to dial in, you’d set it and blow them away but it wasn’t that long where you’d find ok I guess on this track and this car category I’m about an 87% for a good race that I can still win if I race well.

Even if we could put some AI onto lobbies just to fill the group out a bit would be nice. I don’t even care if they are dumb AI And more of an obstacle even if you are lapping them.

Yes because you are the one tweaking them, vs having to develop an AI that can work across a broad spectrum of players and driving ability. And even you admit it took a little time to dial in. So extrapolate that across all tracks, all event types, and track conditions and you now see the issue at hand. Where you would have pretty uneven matches at times. This is why this stuff is really good since you can pretty much setup your event and let the AI train Itself then you look at results based on simple conditions met to script out fun events for players.

 

[regnar]

In some areas I can see it's reaction time would need to be dumbed down to match a human reaction time, as we saw in earlier videos at Dragon Trail the AI could cut a certain corner which upset the car, but because it's ability over a most humans, it was able to stabilize the car and keep going.

To have a closer racing experience similar to that which we have with humans, AI emotions might need to be added, this adds the ability to make mistakes, maybe it's the last lap of a race and like a human it's needs to push a bit harder that it should and fails.

Other than some type of one on one events being added, looks like something coming to GT8, really doesn't fix anything with the current AI.

 

[Freeman_Cruz]

From what I understand reading this article, it sounds to me like Sophy has superhuman speed, with its only restraint being etiquette and safety. Once it finds an opening to pass a human driver, the player can no longer hope to catch it again as it simply waltzes away with its inhuman pace. It makes me ask the question that was acknowledged in the article: "How is that fun?" Assuming Sophy makes it into GT7, where the player almost always starts last in campaign mode, is that to say that we'll never even have a chance to line up side by side with a car driven by Sophy?

For Sophy to serve as an AI in a racing game, I assume it would have to learn a given player's pace, and then closely match it as they improve over time. Sophy would also have to be prone to mistakes, prone to "emotion" sometimes, like anger and fear. How does it react to a little rubbing, or a flat out punt from the player? Has it been trained to recover a car from a slide? Can it handle changing track conditions with standing and drying water? Until these questions are answered, I can't see Sophy ever being relevant to us, the players of GT7 who constantly suffer oblivious shunts from the brain–dead AI.

As a "sparring partner" that helps one improve, yes, it does sound like the perfect tool. I just don't see it being the savior of GT7 like I so badly wish it could be.

Sophy is based on a learning algorithm. It starts out being disastrous and barely able to follow the basic layout of the circuit, but as it completes laps there are some feedback elements that "reward" behaviors that reduce lap time and others that "punish" inappropriate behaviors such as crashes with other drivers.
By completing hundreds of laps it is already able to match the times of an average player.
By completing thousands of laps it is able to outperform the most efficient players.
Learn states are saved as separate models.
It could be implemented using the learning model of hundreds of laps as medium difficulty and the model of thousands of laps as high difficulty.
Since the algorithm punishes inappropriate behavior, it is to be expected that advanced models respect the race etiquette with special care.
Less advanced models may make mistakes and occasionally hit opponents.
And yes, Sophy knows how to recover from skids, loss of control and crashes because it has learned from those mistakes.
As for "human" emotions, in principle she would not have them, but it is yet to see how these behaviors can be differentiated from imperfections in the learning model. If you force trajectory corrections a human pilot under "pressure" may suffer a "human error" but how different would that be from the possible error that a less trained Sophy model can make in that situation.

 

[Samus]

But, as I've said before, the training is the processing intensive part, not the actual model that runs on the console in the end.

Article

My Sophy opponent was running on its own PlayStation 5 console and we were driving in a private LAN race.

Sounds like it still needs a lot of power just to run. They've got some work to do going from 1 opponent running on a PS5 to itself to several if them running on the same PS4+5 as the rest of the game.

 

[Auditore]

It’s interesting how it was on it’s own PS5. This is looking very good.

Even the AI has it's own PS5 but i don't. 😭

 

[Veinz]

Maybe we’ll get a time attack or something for GT7 but I don’t think we’ll see a full implementation until GT8, the base PS4 is too old.

 

[Techlet]

From what I recall from leaks from a few months ago, Sophy will just be a set of time trial missions like the Hamilton DLC, which sounds like an utter waste.

Of course PD would implement an AI that can actually race and make it so you never actually race it.

 

[happycorey]

Seems like they’ve made some promising development from the article, but like others have said how is that human element going to be implemented? I’ve have some incredible races last week with real human drivers on sport. But there were tons of mistakes, wins were attainable, or I still felt great about my 4th place finish. While losing to unfaulted AI I think it would feel hollow. At least with Sport mode there is camaraderie amongst players.

I can see the benefit of picking up the game and starting a race that is genuinely competitive with Sophy but the obscure cars, settings, layouts and conditions need to be scaled to her skills to make it all work together.

Even if it’s adding them to a lobby to help populate I think it’ll be beneficial to GT, but ultimately the integration needs to be perfect.

From what I recall from leaks from a few months ago, Sophy will just be a set of time trial missions like the Hamilton DLC, which sounds like an utter waste.

Of course PD would implement an AI that can actually race and make it so you never actually race it.

That’s probably going to be the first introduction of it but not the final implementation.

 

[Techlet]

I wonder then if Sophy will be paid DLC like the LH missions.

 

[Dave A]

Article

Sounds like it still needs a lot of power just to run. They've got some work to do going from 1 opponent running on a PS5 to itself to several if them running on the same PS4+5 as the rest of the game.

That's not likely to be power to run a single instance of Sophy, it'll be more about Sophy learning from that race, the controled environment and data analytics etc. There's no reason I can fathom that an instance of Sophy with no capacity to continue to learn would require it's own console to run. It doesn't run at a particularly high refresh rate either. Though it will possibly need optomisation to run as it should, there's no doubt a lot more going on with that setup that just 1 player and 1 AI.

 

[Coquico]

Am I the only one that thinks project cars had decent AI? You could increase difficulty by percentage and aggressiveness. Is it really that difficult to do?

Sometimes it took a little time to dial in, you’d set it and blow them away but it wasn’t that long where you’d find ok I guess on this track and this car category I’m about an 87% for a good race that I can still win if I race well.

Even if we could put some AI onto lobbies just to fill the group out a bit would be nice. I don’t even care if they are dumb AI And more of an obstacle even if you are lapping them.

I think the same about PC! To me was better in the first one.

 

[Jordan]

From what I understand reading this article, it sounds to me like Sophy has superhuman speed, with its only restraint being etiquette and safety. Once it finds an opening to pass a human driver, the player can no longer hope to catch it again as it simply waltzes away with its inhuman pace. It makes me ask the question that was acknowledged in the article: "How is that fun?" Assuming Sophy makes it into GT7, where the player almost always starts last in campaign mode, is that to say that we'll never even have a chance to line up side by side with a car driven by Sophy?

For Sophy to serve as an AI in a racing game, I assume it would have to learn a given player's pace, and then closely match it as they improve over time. Sophy would also have to be prone to mistakes, prone to "emotion" sometimes, like anger and fear. How does it react to a little rubbing, or a flat out punt from the player? Has it been trained to recover a car from a slide? Can it handle changing track conditions with standing and drying water? Until these questions are answered, I can't see Sophy ever being relevant to us, the players of GT7 who constantly suffer oblivious shunts from the brain–dead AI.

As a "sparring partner" that helps one improve, yes, it does sound like the perfect tool. I just don't see it being the savior of GT7 like I so badly wish it could be.

This was a demo so that I could see what it was like to drive with, not an example of Sophy's final implementation in the game. I would suggest reading my other article on how Sophy works to see how it will be adapted to race with players of all skill levels.

According to Peter Wurman, Sophy can adjust by literally driving like a newer driver instead of just artificially slowing down. “This is also part of our future work,” the Sony AI America Director explained. “Our goal is to create an agent that, when in a ‘slowed’ mode, is driving like a less experienced driver, rather than being handicapped in some way..."

Seems like they’ve made some promising development from the article, but like others have said how is that human element going to be implemented? I’ve have some incredible races last week with real human drivers on sport. But there were tons of mistakes, wins were attainable, or I still felt great about my 4th place finish. While losing to unfaulted AI I think it would feel hollow. At least with Sport mode there is camaraderie amongst players.

I don't think Sophy is intended to replace human drivers or competition. It's a training tool.

I would compare it to one of those tennis machines that launches balls so you can practice different types of shots. If you love playing tennis, you'll enjoy it and it will quickly improve your game. Of course, it will always be more fun to play a real game against a real person, but that's not the point of the machine.

 

[TiMcF1]

If online multiplayer lobbies paid out closer to even the midrange payout races in single player I don’t think I would have even finished the cafe menus or at least really taken my time finishing them.

I still am really taking my time with them, have been given a bad impression of café menus right from the beginning. I hate them for cohering me down a path right at the beginning that wasn't truly mine. Just to unlock content that should of been accessible at the beginning.

I really hope PD do away with hand holding elements in future GT games, I find them so frustrating.

 

[TT92]

Here's a question: So if this resource hungry little gimmick requires 1 whole PS5 then how will it ever be incorporated into a 12-18 car field on a single console? Or are we forever only to do 1 on 1 races?

As with others here I didn't find PCARS2 and Assetto Corsa AI to be too bad and quite raceable and so am quite miffed at the hype being generated over Sony's attempt. And I'm still appalled at the video of it from the Nordschleife where it barely managed to stay on the track and exploited PD's odd physics and had so much traction on the grass.

Is there anyone else here that would prefer PD and Sony spend more time on tidying up GT7 and give us more content? Who here wouldn't love full race weekends like the other titles I have just managed? Practice, qualifying and grid start? It would appear that this is beyond PD's capability and so chase AI instead. I would prefer a little good old human intelligence instead ;-)

My $0.02

 

[Famine]

if this resource hungry little gimmick requires 1 whole PS5

That's quite an "if".

The consoles were running in LAN mode, one console per player. Sophy was simply a player. There's no suggestion of how much space or processing power a fully trained client will require.

 

[Samus]

This was a demo so that I could see what it was like to drive with, not an example of Sophy's final implementation in the game. I would suggest reading my other article on how Sophy works to see how it will be adapted to race with players of all skill levels.




I don't think Sophy is intended to replace human drivers or competition. It's a training tool.

I would compare it to one of those tennis machines that launches balls so you can practice different types of shots. If you love playing tennis, you'll enjoy it and it will quickly improve your game. Of course, it will always be more fun to play a real game against a real person, but that's not the point of the machine.

Well that's a bummer. Pretty misleading of them to constantly show its use as competitive AI at these tour events if that's not what regular users are ever going to be doing with it.

Did PD suggest then that there is any work ongoing to actually improve the competition AI, outside of Sophy?

 

[TT92]

That's quite an "if".

The consoles were running in LAN mode, one console per player. Sophy was simply a player. There's no suggestion of how much space or processing power a fully trained client will require.

Yes, just one of the many unknowns.

What would have really impressed me would have been them demo a race with 12/18 Sophies from that one console. This also would have answered numerous questions as well.

With PCARS2 I often raced online with friends and a field made up of AI and it was mostly pretty good fun :-)

 

[Techlet]

I can't help but feel like Sophy would have been perfect for a new and improved B-Spec or even a full on Gran Turismo Manager spinoff.