The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars.<p>What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person.<p>1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals.<p>2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk.<p>3) Implement some of the recent ideas from deep reinforcement learing [2,3]. For training, feed the system with the oberservations from test drives and reward actions that mimick the reactions of actual drivers.<p>In 2k lines of code he probably does not have a car model that can be used for path planning [4] (with tire slippage, etc.). So his system will make errors in emergency situations. Especially since the neural net has never experienced most emergencies and could not learn the appropriate reactions.<p>And guess what, emergency situations are the hard part. Driving on a freeway with visible lane markings is easy. German research projects autonomously drove on the Autobahn since the 80s [5]. Neural networks were used for the task since about the same time [6].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-with-Arduino-and-Seeed-C/" rel="nofollow">http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-wi...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971</a><p>[3] <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konferenzbeitraege/Ruf-Ziehn-et-al-2014-Evaluation-of-an-Analytic-Model__ICMC2014.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konf...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project</a><p>[6] <a href="http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&context=compsci" rel="nofollow">http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c...</a>