Sony has announced Gran Turismo Sophy, an artificial intelligence built in collaboration between Sony AI, Polyphony Digital, and the cloud gaming team at Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Revealed as part of the Race Together Media Event, Sony claims that the new artificial intelligence, which has been trained using Gran Turismo Sport, can race competitively against the best Gran Turismo players in the world.
In development tests, Gran Turismo Sophy was pitted against four of the world's best Gran Turismo Sport players across two separate events, one in July 2021 and a second in October 2021. The first test saw Sophy score 70 points across three different races, while the human team scored 86. After a few months of training, Gran Turismo Sophy was able to score 104 points in a second round of tests, versus the human team's score of 52. Sophy won every race in this second test, and set the best lap time.
Sophy is trained through a deep reinforcement learning system, using Sony Interactive Entertainment's cloud gaming infrastructure. The system trains the AI in three areas: Physical Realism, which teaches Sophy to control a car and exploit features of track, Realtime Race Tactics, which coaches the AI to master passing and optimise its use of the racing line, and Sports Etiquette, which trains Sophy to drive aggressive but fairly.
Sony notes that Gran Turismo Sophy is a different kind of AI to the likes of artificial intelligences used in chess, shogi, Go and things such as AlphaStar and OpenAI Five AI developed for RTS video games. Where those AIs generally work with tactics and strategy, Sophy must also deal with simulated physics, too. Essentially, the AI has to learn how to drive a car and deal with the physical properties of that, and then learn how to win a race against human opponents.
While it was a goal of Sony AI to develop an artificial intelligence that race competitively against the top Gran Turismo drivers, the team also saw importance in making an AI that would also be fun for the top drivers to race against. Gran Turismo Sophy has been designed not to feel unfair or seem outlandishly superhuman.
While Gran Turismo Sophy is already displaying very impressive results, it's not something you should expect to see in GT7 at launch. However, "Sony AI and PDI will explore how to integrate GT Sophy into future releases of the Gran Turismo series," says Michael Spranger, COO of Sony AI, in a new post on the Sony AI website.
For more on Gran Turismo, check out our final preview of Gran Turismo 7.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.