On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers

So the article repeats, several times, “waymo relies on remote operators”. I don’t think the author knows what “self-driving” means.

"self-driving"
Someone else, forreal - driving
A couple years ago, we used to joke around the shop "Of course they used AI - An intern."
The author is very well aware of this dilemma, in fact that topic is the center of his article, and he is making some good points about why real autonomous driving might still take a long time until achieved.
Besides that the cars are constantly getting around without a designated driver. For the technology and for the industry that is a huge breakthrough.
And he forgets to mention the precise mapping required too. He also left out the terrible experiences Waymo has had with revoked permits, cars disabled by traffic cones, and multiple traffic stopping glitches where intersections were blocked for hours.
- Yeah but the waymo ceo doesn't shitpost on Twitter so people here don't get front page hyped up stories every single time things aren't perfect
I'm making a prediction right now that real self driving will eventually rely on people from impoverished countries remotely operating the cars of wealthier countries. Sort of like how AI training data is combed through.

Elon ripped out the LiDAR, I don’t have any faith at all in Tesla’s FSD.

- I had to look this up, but you’re mostly right. They never really did use LiDAR. They did use other types of radar, which were removed or disabled. In any case, they (Elon) asserted that neither radar nor LiDAR was really necessary.
  However, that was mostly a couple years ago. In the past month or two they actually have begun buying up tons of LiDAR.
  Also, they were sued over FSD in court and their lawyers are now arguing that customers should’ve known that cars without LiDAR are not capable of reliable FSD.
But the self driving taxi fleet is coming anytime now /s

Yeah Waymo has been silently ticking away over here for years. On the east side they are all over the place. It will take longer to get to freeway speeds but I think Waymo's approach is far safer. But fuck Google too

Google En Passat

Jesus Fucking Christ what are you fucking stupid? Read the god damn pinned mod comment on every post on r/chessbegginers, read the god damn wiki, read the god damn info button that pops up on chess.c0m, here's a thought just google it your god damn self. What do you think you're the first person in fucking history to experience this "weird pawn move?" You must be fucking stupid because it was only invented back in 1561. But I'm sure you thought "oh wow I know chess.c0m is a company valued in the hundreds of millions but I'm sure me, 100 ELO shit tier chess beginner, has found a bug in their program." It boggles my god damn mind that you just blindly post your stupid fucking questions on reddit without trying to research them first. Because you must be the first person in fucking history to ever experience a problem, and logically reddit, the source of all fucking factual information, is the only god damn place you can look for an answer. So here's a fucking thought the next time you're about to make a god damn post stop and google e-n p-a-s-s-a-n-t.
- Lol. Google en passat
- Are you kidding ??? What the **** are you talking about man ? You are a biggest looser i ever seen in my life ! You was doing PIPI in your pampers when i was beating players much more stronger then you! You are not proffesional, because proffesionals knew how to lose and congratulate opponents, you are like a girl crying after i beat you! Be brave, be honest to yourself and stop this trush talkings!!! Everybody know that i am very good blitz player, i can win anyone in the world in single game! And "w"esley "s"o is nobody for me, just a player who are crying every single time when loosing, ( remember what you say about Firouzja ) !!! Stop playing with my name, i deserve to have a good name during whole my chess carrier, I am Officially inviting you to OTB blitz match with the Prize fund! Both of us will invest 5000$ and winner takes it all!
  I suggest all other people who's intrested in this situation, just take a look at my results in 2016 and 2017 Blitz World championships, and that should be enough... No need to listen for every crying babe, Tigran Petrosyan is always play Fair ! And if someone will continue Officially talk about me like that, we will meet in Court! God bless with true! True will never die ! Liers will kicked off...
- Holy hell
Holy hell

I’m starting to get the feeling that “X is playing chess while Y is playing checkers” is an indicator species for a terrible take.

Much like everytime you see "nothing burger"

Waymo is literally being investigated for self-driving incidents lol... They've also only been able to operate in a small area. I wouldn't really call that chess.

They both suck and Waymo's has a whole ass sensor thingie on the roof. So it's insane that Tesla's is even legal given that they rely entirely on cameras and fate.

I used to be so excited for self driving cars, but my naive younger self assumed they'd actually make sure they're safe before putting them on public roads.

I was wrong.

What's a few 100,000 deaths compared to progress?
/s
We're getting those American robot cars
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  those American robot cars
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

And Cruise is playing bumper cars

More like GTA

Am I remembering correctly that Tesla removed sensors for self driving?

Yuuup. Muskrat decided LiDAR was too expensive to include in every vehicle and scrapped it. Even disabled the sensors on the cars that have it.
My vacuum has LiDAR. That man is a cheap idiot.
- The LiDAR you have on your vacuum isn't going to cut it as a safety relevant component onboard your car. Automotive-grade LiDAR are on another price range. Development for such sensors is quoted separately from the part price, and it costs millions of $.
- When your compensation is based on profit per car, you make strange decisions like removing winker stalks and quality control.
Yes they sure did. I don't believe any Tesla ever shipped with Lidar, maybe some did. The big thing that they removed/disabled was the radar. They did this because the radar and visual cameras would disagree about where things were. So instead of spending more R&D time to get it right. They just removed the radar and called it solved.
That was just an excuse, they just couldn't get the parts. Radar is back now.

Rapid deployment and iteration belongs on race tracks, not the public road.

Chess is a very complex rules game, while Checkers is quite simple. Waymo has a complex approach to self driving:

Expensive suite of sensors
High resolution maps of operating areas
Remote operators standing by

While Teslas approach is simple:

Capture a bazillion miles of camera footage, feed into AI, profit?
Unpaid volunteers teach the AI safe driving
Car has only a basic map for routing, the rest is inferred in real time from cameras

Waymo’s successful approach scales linearly. They have to high-res map every city they want to operate in, and they can gradually bring down the cost of the sensors. They will require fewer remote operator interactions over time.

Teslas success is more difficult, but it scales exponentially. They already produce vehicles at scale and full control over all the equipment on board. The existing fleet would be able to participate as well. If they succeed, they may want to offer buy-backs for customers who didnt buy FSD - the cars would be worth more to Tesla than the owner.

In both checkers and chess, the player gains super powers for reaching the other side of the board. Time will tell who reaches the other side of the board first. They are playing different games on the same board. Okay that’s fair.

Tesla will hit walls with rain and snow. Cameras will fail before other sensors in those conditions.
- Radar and Lidar also get a lot of noise from heavy rain or snow. Fog can be just as bad. Some conditions just aren’t safe to drive in, regardless of who’s driving. I don’t think either of them are trying to design a system for those conditions.
  On a personal note, I have no interest in getting a ride in a self driving car. I do have an interest in an empty car that can drive itself. Drop myself off at the airport, valet parking downtown, easier to share one car per household, river shuttling, through hike shuttling - I would use it a lot. I understand the more profitable goal is taxi services, but I don’t want that. So in my narrow use case, I hope Tesla succeeds since that approach can be used on personal vehicles anywhere while Waymo is strictly city taxis, which I don’t use.

Both are risking the lives and safety of the non-consenting public as they beta test 2-ton vehicles on public streets. Damn them both.

.
- If their track record is better it's because it's a record at a much lower scale, under more controlled conditions, and kept by companies with a vested interest in it appearing good. If Boeing can hide flaws in flying vehicles carrying hundreds of people per trip I think these companies can hide flaws in cars.
  we aren’t advocating for stronger driving tests
  Why aren't you? Wouldn't that be the most logical answer?
  My country has had a very bad traffic safety record, among the worst in the EU, and that was one of the things we used to improve things, along with harsher consequences.
  There's also another solution, reducing people's need to drive. Public transportation could be improved by a fraction of the money that goes into these self-driving endeavors.
  Just adding "AI" to something may look cool and even make sense at small scale but ultimately completely fail in real life. "Sometimes knives kill people, let's put AI in knives that will retract the blade instead of cutting someone". Does that sound plausible too?
- Their track record isn't safer than a human driver... because their system is a mechanical turk.
I wonder what you then think about people who drive after heavily drinking or taking drugs. To be honest, I have more faith in technology than in humans.
Not to mention that self driving can probably solve some other problems too, like traffic jams caused by erratic driving behavior of humans, etc.
If you have vehicle to vehicle communication, it is possible to adapt the speed of all the vehicles on the street to avoid them being stuck in a traffic jam.
- Driving while inebriated is illegal, self driving is not.
  Traffics jams and erreactic behaviour could be fixed if everyone is in a self driving car, but at that point it woild be far more energy effecient, environmentally friendly and cheaper for society to build electrified transit instead.
  If you prioritize the street so that only self driving cars are on it and they need wireless communications to function, how do other road users like cyclists and pedeatrians safely use the street?
  Self driving cars are not here to make your life better, they are here to make a handful of people rich.

And still Mercedes is the car company with the highest autonomy level of any car manufacturer. And no one talks about that.

Because it's insanely restrictive and can't be used by most people or in most situations. It's little more than a marketing ploy.

I just watched a video of one of these going down the wrong side of the road yesterday

Maybe they accidentally outsourced one of the remote drivers from the UK

It really is an insult for checkers as a game. It is a common misconception that it's simple. The game has surprising amount of depth, and the saying "x is playing chess while y is playing checkers" should really die.

X is playing chess while Y is playing tictactoe would be a better analogy.

Chess has roughly 10^{44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10}20.
That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.
Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.
In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.
- Maybe they should compare playing chess with playing Go.
  The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10^{170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 10}80.
- My point is that checkers actually still is very mich complex. Tictactoe is not and every board position can reasonably be managed by a human.
  With checkers, that is unfeasable. That's why I am of the opinion that checkers is unfairly treated as "the simple game" when for humans it is far from simple.
- Agree. Checkers has been solved, Tic tac toe has been solved on xkcd. Chess has not been solved
I usually take the chess/checkers idiom to be more like "the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing" Not that one is smart and one is dumb, but that they're going in completely different directions and playing by different rules.
- Hmm, maybe I've learned the meaning wrong. English isn't my first language :)

We should abandon self driving cars and instead make the roads more safe and provide multi modal transportation options like trains.

I wonder if they’ve thought about having an extra long car, like I’m talking fits nearly 100 people. That way instead of having 25 cars self driving, you could have 1 driver.
You could even put it on tracks so you don’t need to worry about steering. Just go /stop.
Brb gonna patent something…

I still want to see someone slap an airplane grade INS suite into a car and load it up with some maps to see how far it can go without relying on GPS lol.

Not that it would functionally change much, but I find it annoying only self driving cars are still using dedicated navigation setups.

Google Maps has an aneurysm if you're not going above 5mph even though the accelerometer really should have made this a non problem. Its even more dumb to be using your tiny phone receiver for vehicle navigation. GMaps still has to wait until you're past a spot before finally deciding where you actually are.

"Caution terrain..Caution terrain.."
- Pull up ... Pull up ... Pull up
A couple things#
I like the INS approach, but couple that with cameras to correct for random walk error (this is much like our eyes correcting for our inner ear.)
I think the issue with Google maps requiring GPS differentials for getting your trajectory has mostly to do with it being agnostic of your phone's orientation while moving.
Navigation is not the biggest challenge with self driving.
Obstacle avoidance in an intelligent manner is the bigger problem to solve.
If you want people to trust your self driving solution, it has to be able to account for other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, wildlife, trains, fog, blowing snow, potholes, and a myriad of other things that can't be predicted in advance nor be plotted on a map.

But who's playing Clue?

It was the car with the car on the road. The car did it with its own body

OK but put it into cars for sale. Ain't worth shit if I can't buy it

Eh, if there was an automated taxi service that was really cheap (since there isn't a driver) I have a feeling that the need for individuals to own cars would go down.
There are people out there that can't drive or that have limitations on driving that this could help, and in the long term it may be cheaper to pay for a service rather than own a car which needs maintenance, costs generally 20k+ new, and is a liability from a financial view.
- Yeah their tech is clearly gonna be b2b last mile delivery type stuff which is the application I would use it for

And in the news this just in.... Tesla runs over checkered flag and flagman at Daytona. Shortly after, it burst into flames. As it burned it was discovered that the car's emblems melted into the shape of Toyota emblems....