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Comment by ArkyBeagle | Hacker News Reader

The "sin" they are accused of it explicitly detecting that certain test equipment is connected. That's a binary, if-then-else sort of thing. "The boss is looking; look clean."

A GA (or any machine learning ) within a controller is less about being able to cheat than it is ...rebasing something that would otherwise be a constant (from the frame of reference of the algorithm) in a control-feedback arrangement.

If the GA was part of a test stand and exhibited emergent... dishonest behavior :) then ... they did it wrong.

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There are valid reasons to write code to determine if your vehicle is being tested. Modern cars contain all sorts of computerized safety features that would go active in the typical test scenario thereby preventing the static tests that the EPA and others do.

So the car detects wheels straight, only drive wheels turning, and so on, so it disengages the features that would active traction control, reducing engine power, and more. The key here is that VW engineers went further and used that as they indicator to run the full emissions process and only then. There is no viable reason to have any toggle on emissions processes except perhaps with regards to cold weather starts.

We think it's "run the full emissions process" but we're guessing. It's a very good guess, but it's essentially unsupported. It could have been an interaction with one of the other things that got turned of. This seems unlikely,. but it's not 0% probability.

Doing GAs right can be very hard. Like, I've seen cases where GAs hooked up to a certain type of physical simulation learn to exploit the ODE in play and find optima that are based on ODE artifacts, not reality. Eg wind turbine design and CFD modeling.

I remember one specifically learned in Quake to always strafe run because the dx+dy gave sqrt(2) max speed instead of just max speed.

What most people don't understand about GAs is that asking the question correctly and unambiguously can be harder than solving the problem. GAs can have a steep price, it's not magic.

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