https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15082594
article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#understanding-intent-of-other-actors"Our cars see the world. They understand the world. And then for anything that is a dynamic actor in the environment—a car, a pedestrian, a cyclist, a motorcycle—our cars understand intent. It's not enough to just track a thing through a space. You have to understand what it is doing," Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo's software lead, tells me. article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#understanding-intent-of-other-actors
article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#skip-object-recognition-partSo, for most simulations, they skip that object-recognition step. Instead of feeding the car raw data it has to identify as a pedestrian, they simply tell the car: A pedestrian is here. article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#skip-object-recognition-part
article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#fuzzingThey call it "fuzzing," and in this case, there are 800 scenarios generated by this four-way stop. It creates a beautiful, lacy chart—and engineers can go in and see how different combinations of variables change the path that the car would decide to take. article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#fuzzing
article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#iteration-cycle"That iteration cycle is tremendously important to us and all the work we've done on simulation allows us to shrink it dramatically," Dolgov told me. "The cycle that would take us weeks in the early days of the program now is on the order of minutes." article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#iteration-cycle
article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#measure-sophistication-by-simulation1 2"Right now, you can almost measure the sophistication of an autonomy team—a drone team, a car team—by how seriously they take simulation," said Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz who led the firm's investment in the simulation company Improbable. "And Waymo is at the very top, the most sophisticated." article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#measure-sophistication-by-simulation1 2
article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#legible-to-our-eyes-and-minds1It will understand our rules, communicate its desires, be legible to our eyes and minds. article-waymo-secret-world-of-self-driving-cars#legible-to-our-eyes-and-minds1
A memory of a roundabout in Austin becomes a piece of Castle becomes a self-driving car data log becomes a Carcraft scenario becomes a web of simulations becomes new software that finally heads back out on a physical self-driving car to that roundabout in Texas.