Meet the World's First Self-Driving Car From 1968 58
Qbertino writes: The German Web industry magazine T3N (think of it as the German TechCrunch) has an article about a test circuit and a test vehicle -- a modified Mercedes Benz limousine of the time -- that was set up by the German tire manufacturer Continental in order to test tires in a precisely reproducible set of tests. Hence the self-driving mechanism provided by a wire in the test track to send and receive signals from the car and to record data on the test runs on magnetic tape and other high-tech stuff from the time. Here's a short video, erm, film clip showing the setup in action -- driverless seat included. Today's artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen of course, but the entire setup itself seems pretty impressive and sophisticated.
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I find it hard to claim the car was "self driving" when it was directed by a wire in the test track.
It drove itself without a human. The wire in the rack was the technology used, instead of cameras and computers.
Did the human not control the wire (Score:1)
Following a wire is not "driving itself", it's basically following commands input externally by humans.
If I stand outside the car and use a string to turn the steering wheel, is it "driving itself"?
In case you were seriously wondering the answer is NO.
Also I have bad news for you, those puppets you really loved at that one show are not in fact sentient cloth creatures.
I have an AI that can write Shakespeare (Score:2)
The program is really simple. Here it is:-
$ cat Hamlet.txt
A lot of claimed AI is not much more than that, Eliza being the classic example. That is the problem with AI, very hard to define.
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All AI is are algorithms that we don't fully understand yet. The definition of AI keeps changing over time as we understand better how to do certain activities that we once assumed were extremely difficult or impractical to do with a computer.
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That is not the same (Score:2)
You know there is really no difference between the way this works and modern lane-keeping systems right?
That is not self driving either.
But lets pretend it is - there is a vast difference, because in the case of the lines it's using input meant for humans to control where the car steers, as opposed to using a specific car-road integration that dumbly follows a wire. The difference is intelligence and scope.
P.S. I do not have a Tesla. But I have dabbled in writing software for self driving cars so I prett
Re: Did the human not control the wire (Score:1)
At what point does a mechanism qualify as self driving?
A computer is just a more complex contraption.
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At what point does a mechanism qualify as self driving?
When it is making choices based on real-world conditions without a specialized car-specific input.
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You and the author of TFA weaken "self-driving" to the point where it is meaningless.
Using two steel or wooden tracks to guide a self propelled engine is just as applicable so it was James Watt in the late 1700s.
Reacting to input vs being pushed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Using two steel or wooden tracks to guide a self propelled engine is just as applicable so it was James Watt in the late 1700s.
Using rails to guide a vehicle is just using a physical device to push the engine and keep it on track. The self propelled engine is only moving forward and doing nothing more.
In both modern and this old "self-driving" cars, the cars isn't only moving forward, there's also electronics that does some steering in order to keep following a given path. The subtle difference is in the sensor technology used.
The old car, uses a special purpose guide (a wire) that is easy for the onboard system to detect, and determine how to steer in order to stay on track.
Nowadays, thanks to Moore's law and other miniaturization tech, cars like Tesla, Mercedes, Volvo, etc. use the same visual guide that was laid out for humans (painted lanes marking on the ground) to detect and determine how to streer in order to stay in the lane.
The later has the advantage on using the exact same guide that is already laid out everywhere.
The former sadly has to rely on a custom solution, so it can't scale beyond a test track, and would never be useful to introduce self-driving in a city. But it is already useful : recording what parameters (steering/speed) was necessary to stay on track gives you an exact idea of what you're designing your tires for (having good grip and how it impacts the driving).
It's a distant cousin of the "small electronic cars that follows where you point your light at" gadget that was popular when we were kids. Again, extremely crude sensors (because that's the max you can pack inside your gadget back in the 80s), that give a target for the gadget to track and follow. But it's the device that (autonomously) steers toward the target.
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While everything you say is true, it's all just semantics being used to favour one self driving tech over another with little to no real justification to use one over another other than personal preference once you dumb down "self driving" from it's generally accepted definition of "equivalent to human level driving on roads not modified to assist the car" to "needs special roads".
How does the German system wire deal with merging and dividing lanes? How about traffic? Inclement weather? When the answer is n
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I don't think calling him "a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel" is going to help.
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Even so, isn't the subject of the article five decades late? That's gotta be a new record even for Slashdot.
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But it was submitted only recently. That makes it news. For Slashdot editors. Anyway.
Glad to see the AI also got the wipers (Score:3)
instead of the blinkers. I can sleep better now.
" seems pretty impressive and sophisticated." (Score:5, Interesting)
Note to all millenials - we sent men to the moon only a year after this so yes, things could be quite sophisticated back then. Also London had self driving automatic trains on the Underground in 1967.
The technological revolution didn't start with the iPhone or Facebook. HTH.
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The definitions of AI have changed for as long as I can remember.
"That's not really AI decision making, that's just an expert system."
"That's not really AI image recognition, that's just image processing algorithms."
"That's not really AI translation, it's just Google being very fast at searching and stitching."
Bah (Score:4, Funny)
Germany had self driving V2s in 1944.
That's not a self-driving car (Score:2)
That's essentially a life-size Scalextrix. The "intelligence" is entirely contained in the track embedded in the road deck.
Not the First (Score:2)
This car was preceded by the General Motors Firebird series, in the 1950s. See [gmheritagecenter.com]. It included the ability to follow a cable embedded in the road: [curbside.tv].