Driverless cars learn how to drive with GTA5

Grand Theft Auto 5 is being used to help teach the AI of self-driving cars how to drive through simulations of the game's traffic system.

A new article from Bloomberg has revealed an unexpected but perhaps unsurprising new role for 2013’s Grand Theft Auto 5: teaching driverless cars how to drive.

Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 5 features 262 types of vehicles, 14 weather conditions, over 1,000 different pedestrians and animals and numerous traffic lights, intersections, bridges and tunnels, providing the AI of self-driving cars with plenty of realistic simulations to run through and understand.

Alain Kornhauser, the professor of operations research and financial engineering at Princeton University, said the game ‘is the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from’.