Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by ChuckMcM on Saturday November 12, 2016 @02:47PM (#12939801)

I don't disagree, both humans and ML are bad at classifying things they haven't seen before[1]. However that reasoning doesn't disqualify either vision only auto driving systems or machine learning.

Both statements are true:

"Computer driven cars may crash, even fatally, when they encounter a situation that they do not recognize." and

"People driving cars may crash, even fatally, when they encounter a situation that they do not recognize."

The success criteria for self driving cars is that they can drive at least as well, in the common case, as the set of human drivers who are defined to be "good" drivers. And self driving is not invalidated by a computer's mishandling of an event that a good driver would also mishandle.

I expect that self driving systems will be differentiated by how well they handle the unusual cases so a Mercedes system might do better in an unusual situation than a Chevy system. And all of this discussion is orthogonal to LIDAR :-).

[1] http://puzzlephotos.blogspot.com/

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Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by visarga on Saturday November 12, 2016 @04:39PM (#12940353)

There is a difference though - humans understand the surrounding state, computer vision is not quite there. It can recognize things, and in NVIDIA's case directly generates steering commands without going through the intermediate step of building a model.

Humans build models of the world, and such models allow us to predict the future to a little extent, and explain the reasons behind a situation. Humans can intuit the intentions of other drivers and the behavior of other objects. AI can't do that quite as well.

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Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by philjohn on Saturday November 12, 2016 @04:51PM (#12940414)

Also, making eye contact and being waved through. Humans are excellent at reading cues such as this.

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Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by pakl on Sunday November 13, 2016 @12:05AM (#12941956)

You've hit on a key insight. Predicting the future (even by a bit) turns out to be a very powerful learning signal for building models of the world.

It won't work on a traditional feedforward neural network but if you have feedback everywhere it appears to work.

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Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by wool_gather on Sunday November 13, 2016 @02:48PM (#12945232)

> The success criteria for self driving cars is that they can drive at least as well, in the common case, as the set of human drivers who are defined to be "good" drivers. And self driving is not invalidated by a computer's mishandling of an event that a good driver would also mishandle.

This comes with one important caveat: these are the engineering criteria. The criteria of public perception, unfortunately, may not allow for a computer driver that makes the same mistakes that a human "would have", because people tend to mis-estimate what they or another human "would have" done.

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