Grand Theft Auto 5 was a huge bloody game, both in terms of scale, production costs and the insane amount of money it made its creators, Rockstar Games.
Well deserved, too. The game is ridiculously good. There’s no greater joy than electronically snaking some poor fool’s parking spot from the fricken air.
10/10 would park again.
But what you probably didn’t know, is that researchers at Intel Labs and a German university are using GTA 5 to teach self-driving technology to better navigate the roads.
The MIT Technology Review reckon the game is bullshit good for training the driverless algorithms and as a bonus, is way easier and safer to do. Unless of course you’re an electronic denizen of the virtual Los Santos.
The schmick graphics of the games world provide the driverless technology with all the data it needs to operate and learn, which can be difficult to do in a real world setting.
“With artificial environments we can effortlessly gather precisely annotated data at a larger scale with a considerable amount of variation in lighting and climate settings,” said Alireza Shafaei from the University of British Columbia in the MIT Tech Review.
“We showed that this synthetic data is almost as good, or sometimes even better, than using real data for training.”
So the next time your parents chastise you for playing ‘such violent rubbish’, you can confidently tell them to beat it, ‘cos the game is god damn SCIENTIFIC MARVEL.
Source: News.com.au.
Photo: GTA 5.
