
Chapter 4
Sports Simulation —
Simple Soccer
D
esigning team sport AI, and particularly AI to play soccer, is not
easy. To create agents capable of playing a game anything like their
professional human counterparts takes a serious amount of hard work.
Many high-tech teams from notable universities around the world have
been competing in a robotic soccer tournament, Robocup, since the early
nineties. Although the ambitious goal of the tournament is to produce
robots capable of winning the World Cup by the year 2050 (I’m not kid-
ding), there is also a simulated soccer tournament running alongside the
robotic one, where teams of simulated soccer players compete ...