Sony AI, together with Polyphony Digital (PDI) and Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), today announced a breakthrough in artificial intelligence called Gran Turismo Sophy (“GT Sophy”) – the first superhuman AI agent to outrace the world’s best drivers of the highly realistic PlayStation 4 racing simulation game, Gran Turismo (GT) Sport. GT Sophy aims to deliver new AI-powered gaming experiences to players around the world.
GT Sophy is an autonomous AI agent trained utilizing a novel deep reinforcement learning platform developed in collaboration between Sony AI, PDI and SIE. 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.
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 new breakthrough in AI and as such it is published today in Naturehttps://ai.sony/blog/blog-016/ in an article titled Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning.
Distributed, Asynchronous Rollouts and Training (DART) is a custom web-based platform which was developed by Sony AI to enable Sony AI’s researchers to train GT Sophy on PlayStation 4 consoles in SIE’s cloud gaming platform.
The DART platform had access to over 1,000 PlayStation 4 (PS4) consoles. Each was used to collect data for training GT Sophy or evaluate a trained version. The platform consisted of the necessary computing components (GPUs, CPUs) to interact with a large number of PS4s and support large scale training over an extended period of time.
In addition to the technical breakthrough, the deep collaboration between PDI, a PlayStation Studios game development studio and Sony AI, an AI development team, demonstrates how AI can deliver new gaming experiences to players. Sony AI and PDI will explore how to integrate GT Sophy into future releases of the Gran Turismo series.
