A second video detailing the people behind the development of Gran Turismo’s “Sophy” AI system has been made available, picking up where the first installment left off.
The video is called “Off to the Races”, and digs into those interim stages between Sophy’s solo training and the AI coming into contact with some of the best Gran Turismo players in the world.
Although the personnel working on the project were familiar with the Gran Turismo series in broad terms, their collective experience in playing and racing the game was on the thin side. Handily, there was an expert close by.
Timothy Grossenbacher was one of two Swiss drivers (alongside Rolf Ueltschi) to qualify for the 2011 GT Academy regional Franco-Swiss final, and joined the team to give Sophy a highly skilled human to test itself against.
While not convinced the AI could achieve the goal of racing against and beating the world’s best, Grossenbacher was able to provide input into racecraft and etiquette. Initially Sophy was wayward, changing lines on the straight, but was still fast.
With his feedback on board, Sony AI turned to PlayStation’s cloud — normally used to stream content on PlayStation Now and, more recently, PlayStation Plus, but an ideal way to run multiple instances of Sophy on thousands of consoles to speed up training.
Even then, the Sony AI team was warned that the agent’s aggressive nature would be likely to bring out a black flag, just a week before the first test at the “Race Together” challenge in July 2021.
That led to a rewrite of some of the reward functions in order to improve Sophy’s sportsmanship, although that too was an issue; sportsmanship is often something more instinctive than regulated and it’s difficult to get an AI not to do things that makes it look bad.
As we’ve previously seen, Sophy acquitted itself well at Race Together, but was ultimately beaten by the human players — Ryota Kokubun, Takuma Miyazono, Shotaro Ryu, and Tomoaki Yamanaka — on aggregate points.
Of course the AI had another go later in 2021, and the training for that is likely to appear in a future video in the series. For now you can watch the 11-minute second part below:
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