Researchers use AI to simulate soccer with inspiration from world's top players

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting the way we work, learn, shop, and now creating new opportunities for playing and watching our favorite sports. Using AI and machine learning to mimic the behavior of the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, a team of researchers from the Institute for Big Data Analytics at Dalhousie were recently named as runners up in 2020's largest international AI soccer simulation competition, RoboCup Japan Open. This is the first time a Canadian team has made the finals for more than 10 years. 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.