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

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."

Comments

Obligatory Futurama

[Luthair]

Bender: Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern-hitting machine!
Leela: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean, come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
Bender: Oh, and I suppose Pitchomat 5000 was just a modified howitzer?

5-person, soccer-themed video game

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Developers Are Now Building AI To Beat Us at Some Crappy 5-Person-Per-Team, Soccer-Themed Video Game

FTFY - no charge.

Huh?

[Viol8]

Football (sorry americans, thats what the rest of the world calls it) games have had fairly decent "AI" players for years. This is hardly raising the bar. Now if they created real robots that could beat a human at football, THAT would be something to behold. Though I don't suspect Boston Dynamics will be worrying about their share price anytime soon over that possibility.

Code

[Rik Sweeney]

Here's the code:

if (in_posession_of_ball && opposition_near) {
      take_a_dive_but_pretend_you_were_fouled();
}

Re:Code

[JaredOfEuropa]

nationality = 'Italian'

Did you miss an "=" or did you intend to give an entire team Italian passports?

Re:I'm not sure I'd really call chess and go bots

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Not True AI

[Kjella]

If you have to "develop" AI for a specific task (play games) or whatever then in my view it's not AI. I think AI should learn to do what ever task you throw at it.

They're working on that but trying to create an intuition of what's a stepping stone in the right direction has proven hard. It's mostly not how humans learn either. Even if you took someone off the street that's never played football, they've probably seen football. Or they got some basic idea of how it could be played based on analogies from other games. The totally blind approach would be like handing a tribe of Amazon Indians that's been in no contact with civilization the rule book and ask them to figure out how to play. So we're training the AI, but it's not anything like coaching a team. It's more like an armchair quarterback training, here's how a bunch of teams have played football. It doesn't even have to be the best teams, it's more about pruning the near infinite space of everybody doing everything to things that "makes sense".

Then the AI starts doing variations on moves, counter movies, counter-counter moves and so on and refine it. Maybe it's not so glamorous for sci-fi, but at least for automation we're starting to see AIs that can take rather "fuzzy" tasks, look at what a bunch of humans are doing to solve it and start doing it to OCD-levels of perfection at the speed of a computer. That's a pretty big deal for a lot of trades where you essentially apply variations of a skill but where the particularities of the situation has kept it from being automated like an assembly line. As in, I think it will enable AIs to automate a lot of things people don't really think can be automated. And if you assemble lots of these little AIs you'll get more automated processes than looking at one in isolation.

Re:Not True AI

[Hognoxious]

handing a tribe of Amazon Indians that's been in no contact with civilization the rule book and ask them to figure out how to play.

Scotland try that for every major tournament.