Sony’s new AI outraces world’s best ‘Gran Turismo’ drivers

Sony revealed on Thursday that its newest artificial intelligence (AI) managed to outrace the most skilled Gran Turismo players in the world.

In a statement, Sony said that its newest breakthrough called GT Sophy is the first superhuman AI agent to outrace the world’s best drivers of the highly realistic racing simulation game.

The company explained that GT Sophy is a trained autonomous AI agent that utilizes a novel deep reinforcement learning platform developed in collaboration between Sony AI, Polyphony Digital Inc. and Sony Interactive Entertainment.

“Each group contributed to the success of the project by bringing together expertise in fundamental AI research and development, a hyper-realistic real world racing simulator, and infrastructure for massive scale AI training,” it said.

In order to compete with the world’s best championship-level drivers, Sony trained GT Sophy to master three areas: Race Car Control, Racing Tactics, and Racing Etiquette.

According to Sony, GT Sophy's race car control training provided the AI with a deep understanding of car dynamics, racing lines, and precision maneuvers to conquer challenging tracks.

As for racing tactics, Sony’s AI learned split-second decision-making skills in response to rapidly evolving racing situations.

During the second training, GT Sophy, the company claims, showed mastery of tactics including slipstream passing, crossover passes and even some defensive maneuvers such as blocking.

Sony added that GT Sophy also had to conform to highly refined, but imprecisely specified, sportsmanship rules including avoiding at-fault collisions and respecting opponent driving lines.

To test GT Sophy’s capabilities after its training, Sony’s AI was pitted against four of the world’s best Gran Turismo drivers in two race events which happened in July and Oct. 2021.

During the first race event, GT Sophy faced a team which included top Gran Turismo Sport driver Takuma Miyazono and three other top drivers.

In timed trials, each racer took on the tracks one by one and logged their times. GT Sophy also raced the same courses on its own and eventually beat the racers’ times.

However, GT Sophy apparently did not fare well when sharing the track with other drivers in a competitive team race.

After the first race, Sony made some improvements to the AI which allowed GT Sophy to outperform the best human GT drivers in both trial races and an FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships format race during the October event.

Reacting to GT Sophy following the event, Takuma Miyazono, FIA Gran Turismo Championships 2020 Champion, said: “I completely forgot that I was playing against AI. It was really fun. I want to race with the agent more in the future.”

“GT Sophy showed us new possibilities that we hadn't imagined before.” Igor Fraga, FIA Gran Turismo Championships 2018 Champion, added.

Meanwhile, the company explained that apart from its technical breakthrough with GT Sophy, the collaboration between PDI, a PlayStation Studios game development company and Sony AI “demonstrates how AI can deliver new gaming experiences to players,” adding that it also aims to explore how to integrate GT Sophy into future releases of the Gran Turismo series.

“Sony’s Purpose is to ‘fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology,’ and Gran Turismo Sophy is a perfect embodiment of this,“ said Kenichiro Yoshida, chairman, president and CEO, Sony Group Corporation. “This group collaboration in which we have built a game AI for gamers is truly unique to Sony as a creative entertainment company. It signals a significant leap in the advancement of AI while also offering enhanced experiences to GT fans around the world.”

Meanwhile, Hiroaki Kitano, CEO of Sony AI, said: “Gran Turismo Sophy is a significant development in AI whose purpose is not simply to be better than human players, but to offer players a stimulating opponent that can accelerate and elevate the players’ techniques and creativity to the next level. In addition to making contributions to the gaming community, we believe this breakthrough presents new opportunities in areas such as autonomous racing, autonomous driving, high-speed robotics and control.”