Together with developer Polyphony Digital, Sony has officially unveiled Gran Turismo Sophy, the first superhuman Artifical Intelligence (AI) agent to outrace the world’s best drivers of the highly realistic PS4 racing simulation game, Gran Turismo Sport. GT Sophy is a breakthrough for Sony in terms of artificial intelligence, and you can check out more details on this new tech below.

What exactly is Gran Turismo Sophy? As per the official release, it has been described as:

“…an autonomous AI agent trained utilizing a novel deep reinforcement learning platform developed in collaboration between Sony AI, PDI and SIE. Each group contributed to the success of the project by bringing together expertise in fundamental AI research and development, a hyper-realistic real world racing simulator, and infrastructure for massive scale AI training.”

Here are the features of GT Sophy:

1. Race Car Control: Deep understanding of car dynamics, racing lines, and precision maneuvers to conquer challenging tracks.
2. Racing Tactics: Split-second decision-making skills in response to rapidly evolving racing situations. GT Sophy showed mastery of tactics including slipstream passing, crossover passes and even some defensive maneuvers such as blocking.
3. Racing Etiquette: Essential for fair play, GT Sophy had to conform to highly refined, but imprecisely specified, sportsmanship rules including avoiding at-fault collisions and respecting opponent driving lines.

GT Sophy is essentially a next-level AI that will assist drivers in gaming. It’s interesting to see how this new breakthrough in artificial intelligence will be useful in Sony’s racing series, Gran Turismo.

In case you missed it, check out a recap of the recent Gran Turismo 7 State of Play stream here, including new footage for the game before it debuts this March 4 for PlayStation consoles.