No, they don't self-organize into football teams. It is perhaps what they should do, but reality looks very different. Two of my colleagues are taking part in the RoboCup and just came back from the tournament in Bremen (see http://carpenoctem.das-lab.net/). >From what I have learned, the RoboCup teams do the following: the AIBOs crawl around aimlessly and hit the own goal, the fragile humanoid robots fall backwards everytime they kick the ball, and only the robots of the middle size league offer more or less interesting games. Even they are unable to coordinate and organize themselves, usually all team members head for the ball at the same time until they form a big knot of robots, and if one manages to get behind the ball he tries to kick the ball directly towards the goal. Not a very smart behavior, and no robot team is able to implement a more complex behavior such as give-and-go.
Even real soccer teams don't organize themselves as you can observe in the world cup currently. Every team member has a clear role (goal keeper-defender-midfielder-striker), the overall strategy is determined by the coach or trainer, and most of the goals are caused by some kind of accident. I like to consider a soccer game as a sort of co-evolution conflict between two adaptive systems, where each system tries to adapt itself to the other. Normally the boundary between both systems shifts slowly from one goal to the other, on the one side are the players of team 1, on the other side are players of team 2. A goal is usually only possible if the balance is disrupted quickly enough by an accident or a surprise attack, if the imbalance is strongly enough to disrupt the process of adaptation. -J. -----Original Message----- From: Raymond Parks Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 1:27 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Sensor networks and self-organization There's also the Robot World Cup <http://www.robocup.org/>, which has teams of agents/robots that self-organize into football teams. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
