2022 started like 2021: with a great victory for Italy. But this time we are not talking about sports or music. Let’s talk about innovation.
Italy, an Italian team, won the world‘s first unmanned car race. Racing cars of nearly 300 kilometers per hour, driven by software. Artificial intelligence, we are first, beautiful isn’t it?
It all happened in Las Vegas, on the occasion of an edition of the Consumer Electronics Show dominated by the theme of the mobility of the future. The highlight was Indy Autonomous Racing, a competition born last October in the legendary Indianapolis circuit. This time the race was real, in the sense that to win the car he had to not only be fast, but be able to overtake. That’s how they saw each other on the track authentic duels, like in Formula 1, but without a driver. The car of the Politecnico di Milano won, which in the final beat that of the German team from the University of Munich. He won the car, but in reality it should be said that the people won. Also because the machines are all the same, all produced by Dallara. What changes are the algorithms that govern them, what changes are the people who write them.
The team of the Politecnico di Milano it is led by Professor Sergio Savaresi, who has selected 10 amazing PhD students, he says, people who could play in any company in the world. Together they created a virtual driver and named him after the greatest Italian Formula 1 driver, Ascari, to highlight the fact that they are not self-driving cars, but cars with artificial intelligence, which is the sum and synthesis of all the human intelligences that compose it. The final was kicked off with the phrase “ladies and gentlemen, turn on your software”, and from that moment Ascari started driving alone, so well that at one point the Germans ended up on the lawn, off the track. A great victory that tells us two things: first, our best students are among the best in the world; and then, let’s give them a future in Italy. Let’s give Italy a future.
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