Google is using football to train next-generation AI

After vanquishing the best that humanity has to offer in the ancient game of Go, also known as weiqi, Google is now looking to the massively popular game of football to train its next wave of AI technology to “bend it like Beckham.”

The US internet giant published research in June revealing that its “Brain Team” is working on a game known as Google Research Football Environment to train smart agents that can interact with their environment to solve complex tasks, providing insights into real-world AI applications such as autonomous driving and robotics.

Google’s global headquarters in Mountain View, California / Photo credit: bennymarty / 123RF

Google released a beta version of Football Environment as open-source code on Github earlier this year. The game was built using a publicly available title called Gameplay Football and uses advanced game simulation, including goals, fouls, corners, penalty kicks, and offside plays, according to the announcement on Google’s AI blog.

The move comes as technology giants push the boundaries of AI technology, a form of machine learning that has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as it moves into more corners of everyday life, from autonomous driving, smart city infrastructure, internet-of-things applications, to workplace automation.

In 2017, Google outplayed the Middle Kingdom at literally its own game, when AlphaGo, a computer program from Alphabet’s DeepMind Technologies, beat the world’s top Go player, Ke Jie, 3-0, in a Sputnik-like moment that spurred China into a concerted, state-directed effort to catch up in AI.

Ke ended up in tears, calling the AI program developed by Google that beat him in three straight matches “perfect, flawless, without any emotions.”

Although the US is generally considered to have the lead in AI, the technology occupies a key role in Beijing’s Made in China 2025 master plan.

According to a three-step road map, Beijing wants to keep pace with leading AI technologies and applications in general by 2020, achieve AI breakthroughs by 2025, and finally to be the world leader in a domestic industry worth US$150 billion by 2030.

The Google AI football research effort is led by Karol Kurach, a machine learning researcher at the US company’s Brain Team in Zurich.

Football is considered particularly helpful in terms of AI reinforcement learning, as it requires a natural balance between short-term control and learned concepts, such as accurate passing and high-level strategy, according to Google’s AI blog post.