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…
