Why Formula 1 should reject artificial intelligence
As technical director of Benetton, PAT SYMONDS started a machine-learning project. But although we shouldn't rage against the machine, he says, we must resist its interference in the spectacle
In 1999, when I was technical director at Benetton, I started a project to apply linear neural networks - the keys to teaching computers to classify information in the same way as a human brain - to investigate the relationship between car set-up and how well the driver rated the handling of the car.
In those days, we wrote our own data analysis software and indeed built our own data acquisition systems as there were no proprietary products that approached our requirements. This made it reasonably easy to embed the electronic setup sheet into the header of the downloaded data. I also devised a very precise way of encouraging the drivers to be less subjective in their description using a flow chart that related their difficulty in a corner and their perceived loss of time to a single rating from one to five.
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