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All the real mathematicians I know never indulge in such wild speculation...As a mathematician, though not one specializing in anything remotely related, the timing of this fix makes me suspicious. I give even odds this doesn't really fix things or causes other problems.
Self-learning algorithms of this sort are either something you completely understand, or they behave quite unpredictably with the possibility that they are subject to unexpected feedback loops that lead to learning odd behaviors such as the surging.
If the mathematicians and engineers had understood the behavior of their system and gotten it right in the first place, and it was a programming error, one would expect the fix to have been found much earlier.
If the mathematicians and engineers really thought about the system and figured out how it was learning to surge and figured out how to tune the system so that it wouldn't surge, I would expect it to have taken a lot longer than 2 or 3 months.
So to me it seems like they vaguely guessed at what was going on, tried some tweaks almost randomly, put it on a few (first simulated then actual) cars, and tested if it came out better. I doubt they really understand the thing completely, so there is the possibility more changes are likely.
Then again, we still don't know after a few decades whether the Navier-Stokes equations allow for the possibility of water spontaneously exploding or not, so maybe not having a full understanding isn't such a big deal in practice.
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