Build Date: Tue Mar 18 22:30:22 2025 UTC
As Americans, we reserve the right to mispronounce, misspell, fuck, or kill anything that crosses our path. This is why the French can't stand us.
-- The Compulsive Splicer
No, Google Isn't Using Grand Theft Auto To Train Self-Driving Cars
2017-04-27 11:59:38
"Don't Worry, Driverless Cars Are Learning From Grand Theft Auto!" read a headline at Bloomberg News. And soon an urban legend took root. "Major companies such as Ford and Waymo have been using the game to teach their developing technology how to react in thousands of different driving situations," reports the British tabloid The Sun. There's just one problem with this story: it's not true.
Bloomberg described how Google's Waymo is rolling their own coolio virtual simulations of driving conditions. Much of that information came from a blog post by Waymo engineers last December. Waymo's crazy cool new technology runs millions of miles of driving simulations every day, "the equivalent of circling the equator five times, every hour." And Ford and Toyota also have their own cool virtual simulators, too.
It's just that none of them are Grand Theft Auto.
Bloomberg's article does also mention some German researchers who found a way to extract data from a game of Grand Theft Auto V. So Bloomberg's writer thought it'd be cool to say that when it comes to virtual driving simulators, Grand Theft Auto was also "in the mix." But the only people actually using the game are the apparently-underfunded Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team. (They told Bloomberg that Grand Theft Auto "is the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from.")
Okay, but they're by no stretch of the imagination a major auto manufacturer. And that's where the article gets a little confusing, reporting that Waymo "uses its simulators to create a confounding motoring situation for every variation engineers can think of: having three cars changing lanes at the same time at an assortment of speeds and directions, for instance."
But "its" means Waymo, in this case. (Though some news professionals apparently thought "its" referred to Grand Theft Auto.)
And that's how you also end up with a Time Inc. publication about driving saying that Google's Waymo and Toyota Research are using the game to teach their self-driving cars. ("Rather than emulating a caffeine-crazed teen crashing through traffic, these firms are taking advantage of the game's incredibly detailed environment to run traffic, weather, and accident-avoidance simulations.")
Do I want to see a world where the streets are infested with reckless and violent self-driving cars, concocting their own bank heists while hurtling down the highways and inflicting mayhem on undeserving passers-by?
Absolutely.
But are Waymo, Ford Motor Company, and Toyota actually using Grand Theft Auto to train the self-driving cars of the future?
No.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
High Availability Guinness Stress Test
All too often we forget the incredible depth of technology behind the weekly ritual of TNiPN@*. We tend to only become aware of the strategy of High Available Guinness (HAG) when it rises to the forefront during a complete and utter venue failure. Yet we should all be super grateful that this system exists. (More...)
This was an old standby back in my poor college days. Back then the goal was to get butt fucking wasted for as little money as possible. The problem was we hated dirt cheap beer - and some weekends, even Henry's was far more lucre then we could scratch together. So we invented Red. (More...)
Robert Helms makes a living volunteering for medical experiments. Though Helms — and almost all guinea pigs — get paid for their participation in medical trials, they are still "volunteers" according to a byzantine legal code. They are compensated for their time, not paid to ingest medicine. He and "guinea pigs" like him have learned the intimate art of taking catheters in their veins, tubes in their intestines, EKG electrodes on their nipples. (More...)
Eavesdropping on Geeks: 'Star Trek: Discovery' vs 'The Orville'
If you broke into Pigdog's top sekrit headquarters, spying on their mysterious mix of weird science and old-skool geekiness, you'd overhear this conversation: (More...)
Poor Metallica. All they want is to continue to put out the same weak "Heavy Metal" they've been churning out since the "And Justice For All" days? and make gooey wads of cash in the process. The problem is, people aren't buying their bound for the heavy metal scrap heap, over-produced, uninspired, tired crap. And let's face it, their various commercial endorsements won't pay for the lifestyle they've become comfortably accustomed to. Resorting to lawsuits makes perfect sense, when you need spending money. But just one lawsuit isn't going to pay their bills. So, to aid Metallica, I've composed an open letter to the boys in the band, with suggestions as to whom else they might sic their lapdog lawyers on... (More...)
Brother Wayne Lays Down the Truth
Flesh interviews Wayne Kramer of MC5. (More...)
