Game Theory Taken Seriously For Advancing Self-Driving Cars

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

When you get onto the freeway, you are essentially entering into the matrix. For those of you familiar with the movie of the same name, you’ll realize that I am suggesting that you are entering into a kind of simulated world as your car proceeds up the freeway onramp and into the flow of traffic. Whether you know it or not, you are indeed opting into playing a game, though one much more serious than an amusement park bumper cars arena.

On the freeway, you are playing a game of life-and-death.

It might seem like you are merely driving to work or trying to get to the ballgame, but the reality is that for every moment you are on the freeway you are at risk of your life. Your car can go awry, say it suddenly loses a tire, and you swerve across the lanes, possibly ramming into other cars or going off a freeway embankment. Or, you might be driving perfectly well, and all of a sudden, a truck ahead of you unexpectedly slams on its breaks and you crash into the truck.

Leveraging Game Theory

If you are willing to concede that we can think of freeway driving as a game, you then might be also willing to accept the idea that we can potentially use game theory to help understand and model driving behavior.