alt Hacker News> otherwise you can't react
I'm far from neuroscience, but humans don't need to operate at 20Hz to drive a car. And human reaction latency (event to measurable action) is often over 1s (under 1Hz).
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I'm not an ornithologist but birds don't need to consume jet fuel to fly hundreds of miles either.
Humans have multiple layers of processing such inputs and your subconscious reacts a lot faster than your conscious train of thought in case something happens (and then you have to 'catch up'). For the same reason that you don't consciously think about what you do when you are walking or how to stop yourself from falling when you stumble. That's all out of the top level and pushed further down to stack, sometimes even multiple levels.
> but humans don't need to operate at 20Hz to drive a ca
This is not a helpful statement unless you can claim what speed human sensors do work at. And it's going to be faster than the latency of $(sensor + server round trip) Hertz, not getting into LLM processing time.
Let's see how well you play counterstrike with a 100 ms ping...
reaction latency doesn't cover everything. the round trip from trigger to action is a few hundred ms at best, yes, but to enable that we are processing inputs at ~30hz minimum and integrating at ~5hz. you would total your car pretty quickly if you couldn't constantly adjust
>human reaction latency (event to measurable action) is often over 1s
This is so self evidently false, I struggle to believe you think it is true. How could anyone catch a ball even?
The reaction latency you’re referring to for humans includes perception, planning, and actuation, I’d separate that from the concerns of the hardware, which are mostly about actuation frequency.
From what I understand about AV (as a non-expert!), all three of those steps happen at different clock rates, ie you have a planner that’s updating continuously with observations from sensors at one rate, that planner then issues actions that get picked up by the actuators at another rate.
In that sense 20hz should really be compared to human reflexes without perception and planning; in scenarios where one is anticipating an action, response time can be as low as 150ms. in that context, I think 50ms/20hz is plenty reasonable for an automated driver.