# Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars



## tomatopaste (Apr 11, 2017)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...ret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/

Key takeaways:

One car cutting off the other on a roundabout-can be amplified into thousands of simulated scenarios that probe the edges of the car's capabilities.

At any time, there are now 25,000 virtual self-driving cars making their way through fully modeled versions of Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix, as well as test-track scenarios

In 2016, they logged 2.5 billion virtual miles versus a little over 3 million miles by Google's IRL self-driving cars that run on public roads

And crucially, the virtual miles focus on what Waymo people invariably call "interesting" miles in which they might learn something new. These are not boring highway commuter miles.

In that virtual space, they can unhitch from the limits of real life and create thousands of variations of any single scenario, and then run a digital car through all of them. As the driving software improves, it's downloaded back into the physical cars, which can drive more and harder miles, and the loop begins again. (Now compare that to a 16 year old that just got their license. The self-driving car will have gone through thousands of scenarios on merging onto a roundabout and perfected its roundabout merging skills. And every self driving car will also have these same perfected skills. Each pimple faced 16 year old, not so much.)
"The cycle that would take us weeks in the early days of the program now is on the order of minutes."

For the driving software running the simulation, it is not _like_ making decisions out there in the real world. It is _the same_ as making decisions out there in the real world.


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## Maven (Feb 9, 2017)

It was a great article, but very technical and not for everyone. Most people will not appreciate or understand the process whereby the myriad of issues dealing with unexpected can be managed and solved. There are 1,000 or 10,000 or more of simulated miles for every one mile of real driving to validate the simulations.


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## tomatopaste (Apr 11, 2017)

Maven said:


> It was a great article, but very technical and not for everyone. Most people will not appreciate or understand the process whereby the myriad of issues dealing with unexpected can be managed and solved. There are 1,000 or 10,000 or more of simulated miles for every one mile of real driving to validate the simulations.


That's why I broke it down. Ya know, for Corolla drivers.


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## RamzFanz (Jan 31, 2015)

Wow, they have taken the simulation to a whole new level. I had no idea it had advanced this much.


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