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After Go, Developers Are Now Building AI To Beat Us at Soccer (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the it's-coming dept.

After Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence bested our best Go player, South Korea is now setting its sights on making AI that can play soccer. From a report: Hosted by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), the AI World Cup will see university students across South Korea developing AI programs to compete in a series of online games, reported The Korea Times. The prelims will begin in November. "The football matches will be conducted in a five on five tournament," a KAIST spokesperson told the publication on Tuesday. "Each of the five AI-programmed players in such positions as striker, defender and goalkeeper will compete with their counterparts."

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'm not sure I'd really call chess and go bots by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, it's absolutely not about brute-force searching. The search space for Go is so massive that even the fastest computers really can't do exhaustive, brute-force searches for a solution. That's part of what made an AI winning at high-level Go such a milestone. To give you some context: the search space for Go is significantly larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe.

    I agree that it's a bit silly to call these algorithms "AI", but they're not nearly as simplistic as you're making them out to be. To be effective, the algorithms have to do a massive amount of heuristics-based culling before it can start searching for solutions, or else it would get bogged down in the math, no matter how fast it was.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  2. Not soccer by XXongo · · Score: 1, Informative
    An AI will be terrible at playing soccer, because you can put 11 computers on a soccer field running whatever program you want, and no matter how good the AI they are running, they will just sit there. Soccer is a physical game, played on a physical playing field. The human players will dribble around the computers sitting on the field and kick the ball in the net.

    Now, turn those AIs into robots and you may have something.

    But what the article is talking about is not AIs that can play soccer, it is AIs that can play a soccer-themed online video game.