Last updated on April 8th, 2022 at 05:33 pm
It’s incredible but you better believe it: driverless cars are on the horizon so it stands to reason that their car engine computers will be that much more complex. Which is why you will continue to need the experts at Flagship One for the best brains in the business!
Now anyone who’s ever tried computer programming knows how tough that is, so it’s perfectly natural to be skeptical of all the wild claims about driverless cars. After all, just take a look around your computer or your smartphone and notice how buggy all that software is — even a multi-billion-dollar company like Microsoft is continually ironing out bugs in its flagship product, Windows, so how in carnation is car computer software supposed to be better?? And it better be better than the retail stuff we buy ’cause driving a car is so complex, really, that even professional drivers routinely get into accidents every single day! Not any single individual driver in particular, mind you, but as a group, in the aggregate, someone, somehow every single day somewhere is involved in an automobile accident, even professional drivers with years of experience. So just how’s software gonna suddenly put the “auto” in “automobile,” then?
A fair question, and one that in its general form — which is one of teaching a computer to learn for itself, roughly speaking, since driving is really a matter of successfully dealing with new situations — has bedeviled Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers for decades. But recent developments this very year offer great hope: namely, Google’s AlphaGo software unmistakably beating a human Go champion in four matches out of five, with a complete shut-out for the initial three. “Go” is the better-known Japanese name for an ancient Chinese game that’s long been regarded as a chief AI challenge because, unlike chess, which is a matter of brute-force calculations (how many steps ahead can be computed), optimal Go strategies haven’t seemed amenable to modeling by neither heuristic nor algorithm.
That’s because in Go, the various combinations of all possible outcomes are so vast, even for computers literally resolving billions of calculations a second, that it’s fruitless to simply explore each of those possible outcomes and pursue them to the end, comparing them to determine the best next-move to make — which is the strategy in chess software. Yet earlier this year, Google’s AlphaGo team finally came up with something that decisively beat a human Go champion…and not even “just” the current top-ranked player in the world but a veritable genius considered by many to be one of the most legendary masters in the whole history of the game!
The reason this is important for AI and driverless cars is because driving is actually a very, very complicated activity believed by many to be on the order of a good game of Go between champions, one where diffused pattern-recognition predominates over linear calculation. It’s kinda like the difference between central vision and peripheral vision, and programmers have finally begun to make headway in the sorts of things at which humans have traditionally been much better, the “soft” kinds of things that aren’t straight-out brute-force calculations. So computers, through smarter software, are now poised to expand into “big-picture” roles in addition to all the “worm’s-eye-view stuff” that’s long been their domain of expertise, so to speak. Thus actual thinking-like behavior is not far behind…forget smartphones; hello smart-cars!
But until such a time, you can always get your car an education with a Flagship One control unit! That’s right: smarten up your car with a new engine computer or other control module for brakes, transmissions, fuel injection, et cetera. Give your car a new brain with our full line of expertly refurbished and reprogrammed car computer parts for various makes and models — call 516-766-2223 or write us online and “boost your car’s IQ” today! 😉
