A challenge

Over in that other place they call RL there is an ongoing tournament for robotic football (soccer).

Would any AL members (or others) be interested in applying their technology towards an SL robotic football tournament?

It seems to me that most of the work that most of us are doing (creating critters that move as groups, goal seeking etc,) would be ideal for this application with very little modification.

I propose a five a side game using a "standard" robot model that the individual developer fills with his/her own scripts.


Thoughts? Ideas? Rules?

I'd be really interested in this, but not yet as I'm only really beginning work on some critters and I'm nowhere close to having something I feel would be sufficiently advanced to compete. However, I would definitely come and watch!

I'm gonna go with the same answer as Moopf. I'm still getting the hang of this stuff (need to pick your brain again too. hehe) But I'd definitely come watch.

I'd agree. Of course, I also have no freakin' idea how I'd approach trying to get any AI to actually follow the rules of soccer. I feel like you'd have to have a person watching generation after generation of evolving critters, picking the ones that behaved most like a soccer team. Sounds a bit beyond me at the moment...

Actually, when I get my critters to my full feature list for the main release (right now there's a serious bug with the DNA building that's causing them to just sit on the food-generator...) my next thought was to build some self-altering individuals that wouldn't breed, but would travel around learning (specifically, I was thinking of a war-bot to put on one of the hunting sims).

i'm game

in theory this could be pretty easy. just make the AIs bump a ball object to kick it, and record a point when it goes through the goal.

Nah, that's why they use soccer/football for the RL challenges. Most of the rules are about things you can't do, after all, so just don't give your robot any hands and you're all set.

Step One: Sense "Ball", move to it and llPush() the ball. Use standard flocking behavior to keep from colliding with team mates.

Step Two: Same as step one, direct llPush() to send the ball towards opposing goal.

Step Three: Same as step two, but sense opponents between the robot doing the sensing and the goal. If there are any, "pass" the ball towards a teammate who is closer to the net.

Step Four: Add behavior to shoot if there are no team members closer to the net.

Step Five: Defense. Program two bots to watch for opponents that are closer to the ball than any team member, and stay between those bots and the home goal.

Step Six: Goalie. Program one bot to stay at all times between the home goal and the ball, and llPush the ball if it gets within X meters of the goal.

Step Seven: Foul. Program your bots to randomly llPush the other team if they're getting too close to the home goal.

Of course, the devil's in the details...

llPushObject seems like cheating to me. All you have to do is scan for the ball and do a simple calculation to push it into the goal. You don't even need to be near the ball. You could just have a prim in the middle of the field that doesn't move.

So I favor having the players physically bump the ball.

I agree that unlimited llPushObject should not be allowed, however firing push bullets at the ball could be interesting...


The type of 'standard' droid I imagined would be a simple box with a scoop on the front to allow ball control, and maybe a wheel on each side to give a little visual realism.
a very limited 'push' could be allowed to simulate kicking, but only if the ball was either in contact with, or very close to, the droid.

There could be two sets of rules for different tournaments,
1) a structured game where individual droids are limited to certain parts of the playing field, ie. 2 attackers always in the opposing half and 2 defenders and goalkeeper in the home half. This would encourage passing the ball.

2) a 'free for all' game where all team members could be crowding around the ball to protect it from the opposition, this would encourage flocking but could leave your goal wide open...

Two things would have to be set in the rules, maximum allowed speed of the droids and maximum push strength for kicking.


Edit to add thought:- I wonder how the two types of team would fare against each other? The calm, calculating profesionals v's a herd of stampeeding cattle?

Well, what about limiting 'pushes' to pushing other players?
My thinking is that if we're going to allow fouling, I'd have to build something that basically went all Battle-Bots on nearby enemies. Clamp down on the ball and wack them or something =P

ok, I've been thinking about a standard droid for everyone to use. How about a small droid that is vehicle enabled and receives simple commands from your script(s) through link messages?

All it would need is movement commands and the simplest I could come up with was the good old two wheel steering method, where the wheels on each side are given a speed to run at. The link message would be just two chars, left wheel speed and right wheel speed in the form "55".

Speed for each wheel would be graduated from 6 - 9 forwards, 4 - 1 reverse and 5 stop. It would be up to your program to work out which way the droid is pointing or moving (not hard).

Any scripters volunteer to have a go at this script? I'll write my own version, but if anyone else can produce a better one I'll happily trash mine.


Why do it this way? When I was concidering what rules we'd need, the main one turned out as a limit on vehicle speed but I couldn't think of a way to enforce it. Limiting the size of the impulse does not work as applying 2 impulses would increase the speed. A script may only have 1 impulse command per cycle, however if the script runs twice as fast, then more impulses are being produced, making it move faster.
Having all the physical movement controlled by a standard script that everyone uses and 'plugs into' then all droids should perform the same, leaving the best AI script with the advantage, which is what this is all about...

I've set up a small demo at Hypatia 77,77. Assuming they haven't kicked the ball out again...

There are no football rules in the demo, a bit like the real thing..