Genetic Algorithms & training cars

Okay, I'm not going to teach anything myself here, I'm going to share 3 videos that are rather interesting.

I'll go back to stating "AI is not magic" (there is a video of me with that title knocking around on a hard-drive somewhere that I keep teasing people with - I'll find & share it one day - okay that day became TODAY)

These 3 videos are a great tutorial introduction to show "under the bonnet" how genetic algorithms work and how they can be applied.

The first 6mins or so are a great intro to how genetics work for humans/animals and this is key to understand in order to understand how the cars "teach" each other.  Spoiler warning: there is no teaching

In order to follow along at home, you can either just watch the 3 videos or set this up yourselves:

You'll need a copy of: UNITY 2021.3

& this starter car pack:  https://www.holistic3d.com/resources

Within Unity, Open the race-track and then the car.  Turn the car on... 

actually follow the video from 7mins onwards (it's only a 14min video)

Now, to get into the details ( and "breed" the cars): watch video 2 (12min) & video 3 (15min):

As mentioned numerous times in the videos, there is a Unity training course that you can now go visit

https://www.udemy.com/course/machine-learning-with-unity/

....and yes, I did this course way back when (Feb 2019) when I wanted to learn & build my own neural network in C# in Unity...(no, I cannot remember why I wanted to do that, but anyway)

Technical challenge time: how do we now take that knowledge & do something useful that we can use in our daily lives?  you will have to think abstractly and conceptually, basically keep "zooming out" and "zooming out" from the top of your head and start to look and think how this approach can be applied into totally different concepts.