FOOTBALLERS play better when there isn’t a manager screaming at them from the
touchline. Or at least that’s true of the robotic football managers in the
RoboCup, which was held in Seattle last week at the International Joint
Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Gal Kaminka of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, one of the
organisers of the competition, says the result is valuable. “There’s no such
thing as a bad experiment.”
The RoboCup managers’ competition is played on a virtual football field
similar to those in computer games. Each of the 22 players is controlled by an
autonomous program, known as an agent, but they have to work together to beat
the opposition. The virtual players can talk to their teammates, watch other
players and overhear what the opposition is discussing.
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In the managers’ competition, the virtual Alex Fergusons were able to shout
orders to the players. They could tell players what position they should move
to, who they should mark and who they should pass the ball to.
“Unlike the players, who only have a local view of the game, the coaches have
an overview, seeing everything,” explains Peter Stone, one of the competition
organisers from AT&T in Florham Park, New Jersey. The competition is
designed to test the ability of the software agent controlling each manager to
learn, as well as compare different managerial strategies: some managers may
focus on attack, others may be more reactive.
The competition began with two standard teams playing each other without any
coaching. The virtual managers watched videos of the games and then took control
of one team, which played against an unmanaged team. From then on it’s a
question of which coach can improve their team the most, says Stone. Just as in
the real game, a good manager can make all the difference, he says. And true to
life, the players can follow their coach’s instructions or ignore them.
But to ensure that the players don’t simply become drones carrying out
orders, the managers can only issue instructions every 10 seconds. This means
the players remain autonomous. No matter which virtual manager was in charge,
the team without a manager did better. Kaminka says the reason may be that
players did not understand the commands properly or that the managers’ playing
strategies placed too much emphasis on the opponent’s play and not enough on
their own team’s talents.
“There’s an element of chance,” says Kaminka. “Sometimes you lose the game
not because you have a worse team but because of luck.” Some of the organisers’
findings can be applied to other fields, such as which router to choose in a
telecommunications network. “I’m gaining a new-found respect for the sport,”
says Kaminka.