1. Game Plan: What AI can do for Football, and What Football can do for AI
- Author
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Daniel Hennes, Gregory Thornton, Bart De Vylder, S. M. Ali Eslami, Trevor Back, Zhe Wang, Pauline Luc, Karl Tuyls, Alex Bridgland, Nathalie Beauguerlange, Rémi Munos, Praneet Dutta, Alexandre Galashov, Jerome T. Connor, Tim Waskett, William Spearman, Razia Ahamed, Mark Rowland, Andrew Jaegle, Dafydd Steele, Julien Perolat, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Simon Bouton, Jackson Broshear, Kris Cao, Paul Muller, Nicolas Heess, Michal Valko, Demis Hassabis, Marta Garnelo, Adrià Recasens, Ian Graham, Thore Graepel, Pablo Sprechmann, Romuald Elie, and Pol Moreno
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,Progress in artificial intelligence ,Counterfactual thinking ,Data collection ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence ,business.industry ,Computer science ,Multi-agent system ,ComputingMilieux_PERSONALCOMPUTING ,02 engineering and technology ,Football ,Data science ,Field (computer science) ,Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ,Computer Science - Computer Science and Game Theory ,Artificial Intelligence ,Analytics ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Computer Science - Multiagent Systems ,020201 artificial intelligence & image processing ,business ,Game theory ,Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) ,Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) - Abstract
The rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has opened unprecedented analytics possibilities in various team and individual sports, including baseball, basketball, and tennis. More recently, AI techniques have been applied to football, due to a huge increase in data collection by professional teams, increased computational power, and advances in machine learning, with the goal of better addressing new scientific challenges involved in the analysis of both individual players’ and coordinated teams’ behaviors. The research challenges associated with predictive and prescriptive football analytics require new developments and progress at the intersection of statistical learning, game theory, and computer vision. In this paper, we provide an overarching perspective highlighting how the combination of these fields, in particular, forms a unique microcosm for AI research, while offering mutual benefits for professional teams, spectators, and broadcasters in the years to come. We illustrate that this duality makes football analytics a game changer of tremendous value, in terms of not only changing the game of football itself, but also in terms of what this domain can mean for the field of AI. We review the state-of-the-art and exemplify the types of analysis enabled by combining the aforementioned fields, including illustrative examples of counterfactual analysis using predictive models, and the combination of game-theoretic analysis of penalty kicks with statistical learning of player attributes. We conclude by highlighting envisioned downstream impacts, including possibilities for extensions to other sports (real and virtual).
- Published
- 2021
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