After testing FSD Beta for a little while, I’ve encountered a few edge cases where I am not sure whether a solution is possible at all. For example, if you are driving on a one lane road, and you encounter a stopped vehicle, FSD beta invariably chooses to leave the lane and go onto the opposite lane in order to go around the stopped vehicle. however, it’s often the case that the stopped vehicle is only the last in a long string of stopped vehicles in gridlock traffic. Or perhaps traffic on a one lane road that is turning. on my commute to and from work, it’s decisions in this regard or approximately 90% incorrect, and I have narrowly avoided a few accidents after the car chose to go around at full speed.
The decision to go around a stopped car on a one lane road is purely contextual. If there is a traffic light a quarter-mile ahead, and you can see that the number of cars is constant bumper-to-bumper, clearly that is not a case where you go around. But other situations are much more subtle, where there could be a stopped car that wants to either make a U-turn (no turn signal, but you see that its wheels are turned all the way to the left, ready to make that U-turn) or maybe the stopped car wants to turn left and is waiting for the opportunity to do so since there is oncoming traffic… perhaps that traffic is a good deal away, but the driver is elderly, so you don’t want to blow past them and scare them, or worse, cause an accident ….or maybe the stopped car is waiting to allow a pedestrian or a cyclist or a school bus to clear the way up ahead. Human drivers notice this through contextual clues, maybe by looking at the driver him/herself— contextual clues are nearly infinite, and must be nearly impossible to quantify.
reminds me of this excellent
Tom Scott video where he discusses how computers may be unable to solve human language because of their inability to resolve contextual clues. I feel it must be the same with autonomous driving.
how can Tesla solve this with as much certainty (or more!) than a human? Is that even possible? The human ability for pattern recognition based on an almost infinite number of contextual clues really seems like an unsolvable problem to me… and that’s just for the simple situation of going around a stopped car! What do you folks think? Have you found similar cases like this? What other edge cases do you think are unsolvable, or perhaps I am wrong in my thoughts here?