Gran Turismo Sport, a video game developed by the Japanese studio Polyphony Digital Inc (PDI) and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), has found its master: Gran Turismo Sophy. On February 9, Sony AI, PDI and SIE announced the creation of this AI capable of beating the best drivers in the world in Gran Turismo Sport, the car racing simulation game on PS4. GT Sophy’s mission is to provide gamers around the world with new AI-driven gaming experiences, but it will not be present in GT7, which is scheduled for release in early March.

The Gran Turismo series began in 1997. Released in 2017, Gran Turismo Sport on PS4, aimed at a wider audience, is an online game where up to 24 players can compete in single races or official competitions.

Gran Turismo Sophy

Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy) is the result of a collaboration between Sony AI, a leading AI research organization, PDI, the creative studio behind the popular Gran Turismo games, and SIE, the PlayStation company. While Sony AI was established in April 2020, the Gran Turismo Sophy project began the following August. Sony AI developed the GT Sophy AI, the deep learning platform while SIE enhanced its cloud infrastructure for large-scale GT Sophy training.

Kenichiro Yoshida, chairman and CEO of Sony Group Corporation said:

“Sony’s goal is to fill the world with excitement through the power of creativity and technology, and Gran Turismo Sophy™ is the perfect emblem of this. This group collaboration in which we have built a gaming AI for gamers is truly unique to Sony as a creative entertainment company. It marks a giant step forward in the development of AI while providing enhanced experiences for GT fans around the world.”

According to Sony, deep learning (RL) “is particularly well-suited to the development of gaming AI agents because RL agents take into account the long-term impact of their actions and can independently collect their own data during learning, avoiding the need for complex, hand-coded behavior rules. However, dealing with complex domains like Gran Turismo requires equally complex and nuanced algorithms, rewards and training scenarios.”

DART, a distributed training platform

To train Gran Turismo Sophy in the SIE cloud platform, Sony AI developed the “Distributed, Asynchronous Rollouts and Training” (DART) platform. It allows them to specify experiments, have them run automatically when cloud resources are available, and collect data that can be viewed in the browser. DART had access to more than 1,000 PlayStation 4 (PS4) consoles whose collected data was used to train GT Sophy or evaluate a previously trained version. The platform consisted of the necessary computing components (GPU, CPU) to interact with a large number of PS4s and support large-scale training over a long period of time.

Gran Turismo Sophy against 4 of the world’s best players

Sony AI tested GT Sophy’s capabilities by having it compete with four of the best Gran Turismo drivers at the two Race Together Challenge events in July and October 2021. The AI beat them in both time trials and in an FIA-certified Gran Turismo Championships format race at the second event in October. Hiroaki Kitano sees further potential in the AI and states:

“Gran Turismo Sophy marks a milestone in the development of AI, the goal of which is not simply to be better than human players, but also to provide them with a challenging opponent capable of accelerating and taking players’ techniques and creativity to a higher gear.In addition to contributing to the advancement of the gaming community, we believe this breakthrough holds great promise for areas such as autonomous racing, autonomous driving, high-speed robotics and control.”

He concludes:

“AI research offers us a great opportunity to really think about what it means to be human and how technology and society can better coexist.”

Translated from Retour sur Gran Turismo Sophy, l’IA de Sony qui bat les meilleurs pilotes de Gran Turismo