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Competent AI opponents are the key to a good single-player racing game. And with this week’s update, Gran Turismo 7 is getting an AI upgrade as Sony rolls out its Sophy AI agent as a permanent feature of the game. The entertainment company tested the waters earlier this year for a few weeks in a limited test, but when the GT7 Spec II update rolls out to consoles tomorrow morning, Sophy will be able to race 340 of the game’s cars on nine of its tracks.
Ideally, you want the AI in a racing game to be good enough that the race is a challenge, but perhaps not quite so unbeatable that it’s a fool’s errand to try to win.
That’s been harder than it sounds to get right—the older players among us will remember the AI in earlier installments of GT, which mostly stuck to a preprogrammed line with little concern for where you, the human player, wanted to put your car. Microsoft’s long-running Forza franchise actually has its origin in a neural net experiment, and more recently, its developers used each human player to train an AI agent that would populate their friends’ games, albeit with imperfect results.
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Source: Ars Technica – Almost-unbeatable AI is now a permanent feature of Gran Turismo 7