Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting the way we work, learn, shop, and now creating new opportunities for playing and watching our favourite sports.
Using AI and machine learning to mimic the behaviour of the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, a team of researchers from the at 国民彩票 were recently named as runners up in 2020鈥檚 largest international AI soccer simulation competition, . This is the first time a Canadian team has made the finals for more than 10 years. 聽
International robotics competition RoboCup uses soccer simulation to promote robotics and AI research with the research findings used to advance many areas. By 2050, the competition aims to train a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots to win a soccer game against the winner of the most recent World Cup.
A new way of using AI
RoboCup uses a variety of AI and machine learning models to train autonomous 鈥榩layers鈥� in different positions to collaborate and play together in an intelligent way.
鈥淪o, most of our decision making is based on AI,鈥� says Mahtab Sarvmaili, a PhD student in the Faculty of Computer Science. 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 use it, the number of decisions is too much. We have to use AI to have a better approach, or better way of playing the game. Now we are trying to make it more similar to the real world, especially by using the reinforcement learning method that鈥檚 like training the agent without having any actual supervision from humans.鈥�
Stan Matwin, Canada Research Chair and director of the Institute for Big Data Analytics adds, 鈥淭his is a new way of using AI where we use a whole range of AI methods to create a simulation of perception so that the agents or 鈥榩layers鈥� work autonomously but also learn how to collaborate.鈥�
Addressing bigger issues
While these methods are presenting new ways to play and consume sports particularly during a time where much in person activity is suspended, the team is identifying other ways to use this research to address bigger issues such as cleaning our oceans.
鈥淢ainly what can be extracted from this is how agents or robots can collaborate to achieve a certain goal,鈥� explains Amilcar Soares, an assistant professor at Memorial University and former 国民彩票 postdoc. 鈥淟et鈥檚 think about the ocean domain. One interesting problem that I see several companies discussing is how we can make autonomous agents collaborate to clean the ocean. So, you could have multiple agents and humans can assign tasks to the agents to collaborate in a way that the final task will clean the ocean or river.鈥�
Mahtab echoes that this method of training agents makes them learn behaviours, resulting in them working in the most effective and intellig