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A comment on Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow. Parent comment

Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by Retra on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @10:58AM (#18024597)
Well, that's a great question. It's also basically equivalent to the one that I asked. My point would be that I don't have an answer to that question, and given your response, I bet you don't either. Which leaves either of us at a loss when we try to create a safe and reliable autonomous vehicle.

It's certainly not an unanswerable question. It's just quite hard to verify that they answer you have is a sufficiently correct one.

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Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by xapata on Thursday September 20, 2018 @12:25AM (#18029785)
> It's just quite hard to verify that they answer you have is a sufficiently correct one.

Why? It seems to me that estimating the confidence of a prediction by the quality of measurements is not an infrequent machine learning task. It'd be more complex for a driving algorithm than calculating the confidence interval of a linear regression, but it's in the same theme.

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Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by Retra on Friday September 21, 2018 @07:45PM (#18043503)
A computer can predict with 100% confidence if you give it few enough measurements. That doesn't mean it will make the correct decisions. You have to already know you're measuring the right things.
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Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by xapata on Saturday September 22, 2018 @10:18AM (#18046048)
If you don't want it to do that, don't program it that way. Code it to assume some and to estimate the degree of mismeasurement.
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Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by wool_gather on Thursday September 20, 2018 @08:20PM (#18036371)
Fair enough! You're absolutely right: I don't know the answer. I misinterpreted your post as suggesting/implying that there is no answer for a computer.
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