Related Background and History

Professor Alan Mackworth first proposed robotic soccer as a test bed for multi-agent robotics research in his paper "On Seeing Robots" in 1992. The world's first soccer-playing robots Dynamites were built in The Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI) headed by professor Mackworth.

In June 1993, a group of researchers in Japan, including Minoru Asada, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Hiroaki Kitano, decided to launch a robotic soccer competition. They named it Robot World Cup, RoboCup for short. The first Robocup was held during the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 1997, in Nagoya, Japan.

To satisfy the need for a common environment, the Soccer Server was developed by Noda Itsuki to make it possible to compare various AI algorithms for multi-agent systems. Because the physical abilities of the players are all identical in the server, individual and team strategies are the focus of comparison. The Soccer Server is used by many researchers and has been chosen as the official simulator for the RoboCup Simulation League.

During his Master's thesis research, Yu Zhang has been wondering who would be the winner if a team of AI programs compete with a team of human players in a simulated virtual soccer game. Noda's Soccer Server has complicated client/server protocol which makes it very hard for a human player to have a fair competition with AI programs. In his Master's Thesis, Yu Zhang proposed to build a new soccer simulation environment which has a simplified client/server interface by letting the server do the low level actions, so human players can fairly compete with robots on a strategic multi-agent cooperation level. Encouraged by professor Mackworth, Yu started to write this new soccer simulation game "The Tao of Soccer".