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Comment by tgaj | Hacker News Reader

"Common sense" is a set of rules. I see a lot of drivers doing stupid things and I will confess that I am one of them sometimes so it's not like 'common sense" is some kind of magical human ability that we are born with. It's set of rules that we automatically acquire when driving long enough (or not if we are not observant enough) and I believe AI cars can learn that as well.

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I feel often times that common sense violates rules. For instance, driving over a double yellow to give more space to something inside of the road. Maybe it is a set of rules some of which exist outside of common law.

Exactly. The car sees the rule "don't cross the double yellow". The human sees the more general "double yellow means there is insufficient visibility for a pass". You must not put yourself in a position of having to be across it, but that doesn't mean you can't be nice to a bike in the bike lane if visibility and traffic permit.

We can add the exception for the car "if there is no another car approaching and you have to overtake a bike then you can go over double yellow but you need to reduce speed" - computers are fast enough to analyze thousands of rules and exceptions every second and choose the best option.

Yeah, but you can’t manually encode every rule of common sense — especially if the rule is more analog than discrete.

We have a method for that - it's called "fuzzy logic".

"Driving over a double yellow to give more space to something inside of the road when there is no other car approaching from opposite direction and visibility is good" is still a rule that the AI-powered car can use.

Common sense is having a true understanding of the world not a bunch of pixel patterns only.

I don't think there is something like "true understanding of the world". Every driver has his own "understanding of the (road) world". Some are careful, some are agressive. It depends on personal experience

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