Trying to Understand RoboCup
Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, Ian Frank, Katsuto Arai
To appear in AI Magazine, 2000.
Abstract:
As the England striker Gary Lineker famously said ``Football is a
very simple game. For 90 minutes 22 men go running after the ball and
at the end the Germans win.'' But although the game is simple,
analysing it can be hard. Just what makes one team better than
another? How much difference do tactics make? Is there really such a
thing as a "lucky win"?
Here, we try to answer these questions in the context of RoboCup. To
do this, we take the giant set of log data produced by the simulator
tournaments from 1997 to 1999 and feed it to a data-munching program
that produces statistics on important game features. Using these
statistics, we identify precisely what has improved in RoboCup,
and what still requires further work. Plus, since the data-muncher can
work in real-time, we can also release it as a proxy server for
RoboCup. This proxy server gives all RoboCup developers instant access
to statistics while a game is in progress, and is a promising step
towards an important goal: understanding RoboCup.
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