It may be easier to go around a track than drive around a crowded city, but reaching any level of mastery is going to be pushing it. The best racing AIs so far have only reached the level of an average amateur racing driver, doing hotlaps alone in one circuit.
To my best knowledge, no-one has ever put two or more AIs racing on one track. In computer games and simulations, all the AIs either cheat (ie. drive with physics disabled on a pre-set track when they aren't close to the player) or are terribly bad, causing collisions whenever something unexpected happens (e.g. overtaking attempts by the player). I have never raced against a simulator AI that was any good (and I've tried a lot of different games and I do competitive sim racing).
If and when this series will take place, it will be pushing the state of the art forward. There's nothing like it in existance.
This will be very good practice for autonomous drivers. Multi-agent collision avoidance is a very difficult research problem and needs to be solved before there can be large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles. I presume the cars will be broadcasting their positions (and perhaps even their intentions) to others.
no, they banned it for the same reason they banned all other neat stuff like 6 wheels, ground effect aerodynamics, unrestricted turbos resulting in 1300HP, engine capacity/fuel flow, actually ALL engine development (everyone uses same engine). Cost, smaller teams had trouble keeping up with R&D.
F1 is boring right now, everyone drives same engine, same tires. Formula E is even worse - everyone drives same car.
(Some might say it's not much of a sport anyway, but it seems popular.)
Yeah, that is another argument. Not many people understand that driving a F1 car is hugely physically challenging though and drivers need to be in top shape. Us mere mortals would be exhausted after 2 laps and could not hold our head straight for even one high speed corner.
Watch Richard Hammond, who's spent more time than 99.9% of us driving fast cars round racetracks, spend an entire day and not getting it quite right: https://youtu.be/EGUZJVY-sHo