Trackmania is all about those crucial hundredths, but how do you fare against a perfect driving AI?
The racing game Trackmania Nations Forever revolves around community-created tracks and the hunt for the fastest time. For one player, competing against human opponents was not enough. The solution was obvious: an AI. “Trial and error” Yosh has 17 years of experience in Trackmania and wanted to find out whether he could create an AI that could become unbeatable for him. In a YouTube video, he documents three years of hard work in which he not only teaches the AI how to drive, but also turns it into an absolute racing machine:
In the beginning, Yosh built a simple track with a few curves. With each attempt, the AI learned more, but still lagged behind his times
Using the principle of “trial and error”, i.e. the constant repetition of the trackin order to make one less mistake with each attempt, the AI managed to defeat the human.
Until then, the AI had only been able to steer and accelerate, but now it had to brake and drift. But even these maneuvers were achieved by the artificial intelligence through training. In the meantime, the AI is also outpacing Yosh on more complex tracks and can no longer be beaten.
How to drive the tracks
If you want to compete against the AI times, you can even download the tracks. For this you need the game Trackmania Nations Forever
In addition, you need the Trackmania Unlimiter, a tool that the community has been using for years and is an extension of the track editor  . On the website (Trackmania Nations Forever Exchange) you will also find installation instructions.
The last step is of course the (download of the three tracks), also via the page where the tool can be found. Then you just have to beat the following AI track times:
- Level 1: 29.00 seconds
- Level 2: 4 minutes and 20.86 seconds
- Level 3: 41.18 seconds
The creation process of the AI is an exciting story and well presented in the video. The creation of images and other media with AIs is certainly controversial. What do you think of this use of artificial intelligence? Do you want to compete with a machine that is becoming more and more perfect? Let us know in the comments.
