You might have fond memories from childhood about going on neighborhood scavenger hunts.

Usually, these were fun-filled treasure hunts involving a list of unusual items to be found and then going door-to-door to ask whether any of your neighbors happen to have the peculiar object. Perhaps the list included something relatively commonplace such as a red crayon or a copper penny. The oddball items such as a receipt from a local grocery store or a slightly used baseball game ticket were usually discovered on a happenstance basis.

If the scavenger hunt was more challenging it might consist of riddles that had to be solved. Either the riddle would be used to indicate what items were to be found (imagine a riddle for which the answer is a red crayon, that kind of thing), or the riddle could only be solved if you also had obtained the designated item from a neighbor. These kinds of scavenger hunts were typically reserved for older children since the whole aspect of figuring out riddles could be quite frustrating to toddlers and seemingly ruin the joy and excitement associated with the cherished hunt.

Here’s something that perhaps you might not have tried.

When I was in college, I’d go on scavenger hunts with my college-age buddies and do so via professionally organized driving-based scavenger hunts. Not many people have done this, and likewise not many are even familiar with the concept altogether.

The way it worked was that you would sign-up and pay a modest fee to participate in the scavenger hunt. Besides the fun of participating, there was usually a prize of some kind for whoever completed the scavenger hunt the soonest and had the most items correctly obtained. The prize might be cash or a gift card or merely a trophy. In any case, you would start the timed activity by arriving at a designated parking lot on a certain day and time. There would be lots of other cars there too, all waiting for the event to get underway.

An organizer of the event would come to your car, provide you with the list for the scavenger hunt, and then markdown your starting time. This allowed for everyone to get underway on a staggered basis and not be jockeying crazily to get underway. Despite this notion of separating out the vehicles, the reality was that once you got partway through the scavenger hunt, the odds were that you would encounter other cars that were circling in the same places as they desperately attempted to find the items on the list.

Unlike going door-to-door, the driving-oriented scavenger hunt usually consisted of merely eyeing things and writing down what you saw.

For example, the list might ask how many fire hydrants there are on a particular street. You would need to drive to that street, cruise down the street, and count the number of fire hydrants. This might be tricky because the list could subtly state that you were to spy only yellow fire hydrants, thus if you weren’t paying close attention you might miscount by including a red fire hydrant that just so happened to be on the street too (the organizers intentionally tried to mess you up by providing those kinds of conditions or criteria, knowing full well that some players would be inattentive and ultimately mess-up accordingly).

To properly undertake a driving scavenger hunt, the most common approach consisted of having a driver and several passengers that were supposed to be the eyes and ears for spotting the items.

The passengers would be responsible for inspecting the list, marking the answers, and being the mainstay of solving the clues. In some cases, teams decided to have each passenger inside their car be responsible for looking out their particular side window, doing so on an assigned basis, and thus averting having all the passenger’s strain from looking wildly back and forth. Others thought that was a stupid tactic and just had everyone look whichever way they wanted.

Though this was supposed to be a joyful experience, some people took things a bit far and made the trek into a do-or-die kind of affair. You could see people inside other cars that were yelling and screaming at each other. They weren’t having fun, they were threatening each other with bodily harm. Indeed, sometimes at the endpoint of the scavenger hunt that had all the cars come to a parking lot to see who won, the driver and passengers would oftentimes no longer be speaking to each other. I knew of some friendships that completely fell apart due to a scavenger hunt that got quite ugly and a team decided they never would be around the other person ever again.

That was quite sad and not at all in the spirit of the matter.

I assure you that I have fond memories of those driving-based scavenger hunts. If you had a team that perceived the event as a chance to be with friends and have a good time, the likelihood was that win-or-lose the point was well-taken that you were just having a grand old time.

There was something else though that was a bit disconcerting about these events, beyond the possibility of friendship splitting.

The off-putting aspect involved the task of driving.

In theory, the driver for each car would be fully concentrating on the driving task. They would not be distracted by figuring out the riddles and nor be sidetracked by counting fire hydrants (they would let their passengers do this). Of course, that’s not how things actually worked.

The drivers wanted to partake in the whole process. This meant they were not entirely focused on the road ahead. That’s a recipe for disaster. There were numerous occasions of near misses with other vehicles (for more about the near-miss topic, see the link here). If pedestrians happened to be on a street that was being used for the scavenger hunt, heaven help them. A jaywalker was likely to get poked.

It was rumored that some of the drivers would have a few drinks before starting the scavenger hunt. We didn’t do this, but it isn’t surprising to think that others did so. The outlaw brazen teams would have liquor inside the car and be drinking during the scavenger hunt. Most of the contests usually stipulated that no drinking while driving was allowed, but this was not especially monitored, and unless someone tattled there was little chance that the organizers would know that the rules were being broken.

I don’t know how everyone ended up surviving these madcap activities.

You had drivers that were wildly distracted and driving like maniacs (recall that the scavenger hunt was being timed, so being speedy was a near necessity). There were tons of near-misses and yet I never heard of anyone actually colliding. Some idiots drank beforehand or were drinking while driving. Again, amazingly no one got into a car crash though I cannot say why that lucky streak occurred.

Let’s be abundantly clear, do not drink and drive, and do not drive while drunk.

Shifting gears, consider the notion of a driving-based scavenger hunt in the future, and ponder what it might be like.

Here’s a question to contemplate: Will people potentially use AI-based true self-driving cars to carryout driving-based scavenger hunts, and if so how might it be undertaken?

Let’s unpack the matter and see.

Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And Scavenger Hunts

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

An obvious advantage of undertaking a driving-based scavenger hunt via a self-driving car is that you don’t need to have a human driver. No need to worry that the driver is going to be driving while intoxicated. No concerns about the driver being distracted by the treasure hunt riddles or by the spying of the road to find the clues and answers.

Instead, the passengers can have all the fun and do so without the worries of a human driver at the wheel. This also means that everyone inside the car can partake in the same manner and none of you has to take on the arduous chore of watching the road. Presumably, your self-driving car is not going to ram into other cars, it won’t strike pedestrians, and otherwise, the last thing on the minds of the passengers is anything whatsoever involving the driving of the vehicle.

Party time!

There are several other twists and turns involved too.

One aspect would be the surprisingly difficult aspect of getting the AI driving system to drive where you need to go.

Allow me a moment to explain this.

Most of today’s self-driving car efforts are assuming that people will use self-driving cars to simply go from point A to point B. In a ridesharing kind of way, you will request a lift, the self-driving car will arrive at wherever you are, and you will have stated where you want to go. Perhaps you need a lift from your home to the grocery store. In that sense, you are going from point A to point B.

I’ve previously emphasized that people are not going to like being constrained in such a manner. Sure, if you are using a conventional ridesharing service, you expect that you can only go from point A to point B. But, if you owned a car and took it for a drive, the odds are that you would not restrict yourself in that same fashion.

Think of the number of times that you were driving your car and suddenly decided that you wanted to swing through a drive-thru fast-food eatery, or maybe opted to drive to a Starbucks to get a cup of java. Furthermore, you might be driving along and see something that catches your attention, maybe an interesting looking house that looks like the kind of house one day that you’d like to live in. Even though you are ostensibly driving from point A to point B, you decide to take a bit of an offshoot so you can drive past that noteworthy home.

The emphasis being that though most of the self-driving cars are aiming right now for the straight-ahead idea of going from point A to point B, you can bet your bottom dollar that people are going to want to have much more latitude in the driving navigation and direction (see more of my coverage on this topic at this link here).

For the scavenger hunts that I’ve described, there was never any specific point B that we were trying to reach. The clues might have said something like drive forward three blocks, make a left turn, go down two blocks, and now you are to start counting the number of fire hydrants. There wasn’t a specific address that we could have merely entered into a self-driving car ridesharing system.

This brings up another salient topic.

Self-driving cars are likely to be using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to interact with passengers.

This is important since the riders will want to discuss with the AI driving system the facets of the driving journey. Maybe someone in the car has gotten car sick and urgently wants the AI to bring the car to a halt so they can get out of the vehicle and find some momentary relief. NLP is not quite yet at the proficiency level on the driving nuances and adjustments that people are going to express.

The NLP will gradually be getting better and better at having discourse with the riders. Meanwhile, the back-up posture is that the passenger will invoke an OnStar-like capability in the vehicle that will connect them with a remote human agent, for which the remote agent might then instruct the vehicle about what to do.

Few of today’s NLP for AI driving systems could cope with a scavenger hunt.

The ambiguity of where you want to go is beyond the realm of a typical NLP system. The beauty, as it were, of human drivers is that they can tolerate ambiguous or open-ended instructions while driving a car. You might tell someone to just start driving and focus on watching the road, while you are figuring out when the next turn should be undertaken. AI driving systems aren’t ready for that kind of haziness.

I’m not saying that human drivers don’t get upset at such ambiguity, and I’m sure you’ve been in a car whereby you told your friendly driver to wait for instructions, and they gave you the evil eye. People are people and when driving a car it can be exasperating to not know where you are driving to. With a scavenger hunt, the drivers realized this was a free-for-all and they were ready for the nuttiest of instructions and those last moment “turn here!” exclamations.

Another aspect to consider deals with illegal driving.

Admittedly, there were driving efforts underway during the scavenger hunts that either verged on the cusp of being illegal or were without question absolutely illegal. Making a sudden U-turn was the norm, trying to quickly go back and recount those fire hydrants. Going faster than the posted speed limit was going to happen. In many respects, this was a car race, and when that happens, there is a temptation to cut corners.

Again, I don’t condone that kind of driving and anyone that crossed over into illegal driving during the scavenger hunts should have gotten busted.

Well, that’s water under the bridge now.

For AI-based true self-driving cars, the base assumption is that the AI driving systems are going to drive strictly by the book. No illegal driving. Speed limits will be completely observed. And so on. I’ve indicated in my columns that this is not quite a realistic perspective and there will be times that self-driving cars might need to break the law (suppose a medical emergency happens, such as a passenger having a heart attack while inside a self-driving car, does this allow the AI to drive faster than the speed limit to reach the nearest hospital).

In the case of scavenger hunts, you can readily argue that it is fantastic that the AI driving systems won’t drive illegally. This makes the playing field equal for all. With human drivers, at times there was a chance that some other driver was willing to despicably break the law to win the scavenger hunt. That was unfair to those that abided by the driving laws. With an AI driving system at the wheel, the assumption is that all of the scavenger hunt participants are playing by the same driving rules.

In recap, it might be hard to use a self-driving car for a scavenger hunt since the AI driving system is not fluid enough to cope with the uncertainty and ambiguity of where you are going. This could be perhaps mitigated by shaping the scavenger hunt into a series of waypoints and thus the hunt would be made into a set of destinations. It isn’t quite the way things used to be done, but nonetheless, a means to still have the essence of a scavenger hunt via the use of a modern-day self-driving car.

The nicest changes will be that there is no longer a crazed human driver, nor a drunk one, and not even a distracted one. All the riders can be comforted in the belief that they are being safely driven. Plus, all the riders can join in the festivities of the hunt.

Conclusion

One criticism that undoubtedly would be launched is that this seems like a rather foolhardy use of self-driving cars.

People used to complain that using conventional cars for scavenger hunts was wrong because you were using up precious gasoline needlessly and you were polluting unnecessarily by running a car that was not serving a serious purpose. Driving to work, that’s serious, and driving to get groceries is likewise, but using a car to simply go for a kind of joyride hunting expedition is decidedly not, they would exhort.

The good news for the use of self-driving cars is that they are most likely going to be EV’s, and you can therefore counterargue that there is little if any pollution involved (a controversial topic that I won’t wade into here), plus they aren’t using petrol and instead are using electrical power.

Given such counterarguments, those that are opposed to the use of self-driving cars for a scavenger hunt are bound to take an altogether different tack and bring up the point that there is better use to be had. Some assert that the advent of self-driving cars is going to finally open the door for a mobility-for-all in our society. Those today that are mobility limited or disadvantaged will be able to get around and the self-driving car will be a kind of a godsend to bring that dream to fruition.

That being the case, they would likely be disheartened and quite dismayed to think that those wonderous self-driving cars are going to be used for scavenger hunts. Put those state-of-the-art contraptions to better and higher use, they would exclaim. This contention is not so easy to address since it has to do with supply and demand. We do not know how plentiful self-driving cars will be. If they are essentially a scarce resource (likely so, especially at first emergence), the argument that they should be used judiciously becomes much more paramount.

One last comment and then let’s call this topic sufficiently hunted down for now.

Would there even need to be passengers inside the self-driving car during a scavenger hunt?

This might catch you by surprise.

Here’s the logic.

The self-driving car is chockful of sensors such as video cameras, radar, LIDAR, ultrasonic units, thermal imaging, and the like. These are used by the AI driving system to serve as the eyes and ears, as it were, providing the data that indicates what is taking place in the driving environment.

If a driving-based scavenger hunt is going to occur that does not require getting out of the vehicle and solely has to do with what you see as a passenger, the aspect of using a self-driving car ergo portends that you do not need to be inside the vehicle at all. You could be sitting at home, maybe assembled with friends, and merely remotely watch what the self-driving car sees, and similarly, remotely instruct the AI driving system as to which way to go.

An eerie idea, I realize.

For those that didn’t like the notion of using a self-driving car for a scavenger hunt, this last point will certainly put them over the edge. If you aren’t even going to be riding in the darned thing, it for sure makes no sense to be running a self-driving car on our streets and highways when there isn’t anyone inside the thing.

As some might say, that dog just don’t hunt.

Time will tell.