Many people have been inspired by the football World Cup in France and now artificial intelligence is learning to play too. Karol Kurach and colleagues at Google Research in Zurich, Switzerland have made a virtual football training pitch for AIs to use to learn how to play. Because football requires a balance between short-term control and high-level strategy, it is challenging for AIs to master, says Kurach.

The FIFA World Cup is about to kick off on Thursday, but researchers have developed an AI that can project a 3D soccer game right on your kitchen table. Researchers from the University of Washington, Facebook and Google have created the first end-to-end, deep learning system that transforms a YouTube video of a soccer game into a moving 3D hologram. They extracted 12,000 2D images of players from FIFA video games, and then trained a convolutional neural network on 3D player data taken from the soccer video games. Recreating something as dynamic as a soccer match isn't easy, the authors explain. 'There are numerous challenges in monocular reconstruction of a soccer game,' the researchers wrote in a new study describing the work.