[Piskvorrr]

Driving has a universal, formal, self-contained, non-contradictory, simple set of rules that all the road users unconditionally follow? Can I see it?

Nope, despite a myriad of road codes, the actual traffic doesn't follow a set of formalized rules: a chess rook can't just decide that it will start disintegrating all of a sudden, as opposed to a vehicle. You could probably approximate the ruleset if you made it self-modifying...which will then demolish your second point about near-exhaustively searching the state space - good luck doing that before the heat death of the universe, as you're essentially simulating the whole environment. Oh look, there's also weather. How's that exhaustively searchable? Asking for the Nobel Prize committee.

For the sake of discussion, let's say that a miracle happens and you managed to do all that - but sorry, it's useless again, the few seconds have already elapsed and you need to do it again. And again. And again, ad infinitum.

Now, I could envision "by our current technology, we can't yet, but we're hoping for a miracle in this specific spot" - but "assuming a massive miracle happens every few seconds, for each vehicle" is completely removed from reality: why not have teleports, if we're in magical wish-granting land already?

[mavhc]

it's ok, you only need a near exhaustive search, and to be better than humans.

For highway driving Waymo had 6 disengagements in 2017, street: 57.

Total driven: 352000 miles

1 disengagement for "a recklessly behaving road user" 5 for "incorrect behavior prediction of other traffic participants"

Seems like predicting other people is almost perfect, the others were more internal problems.

Driving a car when a weird thing happens isn't that complicated: You stop, braking at the minimum amount required to do so safely, to avoid cars behind you hitting you

[Piskvorrr]

Near-exhaustive search of what? You're handwaving away that there isn't a stateless formal graph to search - rather a stochastic, everchanging environment. Again: how do you near-exhaustively search that?

(In other words, yes, it might be eventually possible to have self-driving vehicles, but pretending that the search space is bounded, or even near-exhaustively searchable a la chess - that's just pure technobabble)

[mavhc]

Well yes, my original comment was mostly a joke after all.

Anyway, self driving cars will only get better, and the more of them there are the better they will be, because no humans around doing weird things who don't talk over the SDC network to explain where they're going

[Piskvorrr]

Now that is a future that I can at least imagine, starting with SDV-only enclaves: "no humans driving on the West Coast" etc. Still doesn't solve other road users (cyclists, pedestrians), but it would definitely do away with entire classes of problems.