This is what DeepMind just did to Football with AI...

Dr. Petar Veličković with his science colleagues at DeepMind have just released a new paper called “TacticAI: an AI assistant for football tactics”. The approach identifies key patterns of tactics implemented by rival teams, and figures out effective responses, a huge achievement for modern football.

Petar is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College).

(Note: There was a minor mistake in the intro, Petar was at Mila when he invented graph attention networks, not DM)

Support MLST:
Please support us on Patreon. We are entirely funded from Patreon donations right now. Patreon supports get private discord access, biweekly calls, early-access + exclusive content and lots more.
If you would like to sponsor us, so we can tell your story - reach out on mlstreettalk at gmail

[schumzy]

Based on the constraints - known starting positions, short time period into the future. this makes sense for the NFL

[afroboi]

excited for when this take makes it to video games like FIFA!!

[westwardquest]

Imagine a team of footballers all fitted with vibrating implants that guide where they need to be on the field in real-time and we all watch AIs play against one another. Could call it AFIF.

[haseebpavaratty]

Well, that explains the 'Corner taken quickly' vs Barca

[halim]

I've never been into football and although this is very interesting technologically speaking, it makes me even less eager to watch football. It will significantly reduce the flexibility of football teams to play if everything is about data and sticking to a plan predefined by super calculating robots.

[alextrebek]

@18:10 "similar thing to warfare..." thats the premise of "I Have No Mouth And Must Scream"

[phpn]

"Football". It's pretty easy to see that this is the sort of tech that has urgent military applications.

[happylittlemonk]

in 70s a statistician worked out that more goals were scored from long forward passes and gave that info to Graham Taylor who was managing a 1st division (I think) and they went up rapidly because that. So this study was done decades ago. Now AI can do it automatically.

[noahhughes]

But did it predict "CORNER TAKEN QUICKLY

[orlanino]

Hari Seldon, psychohistory, hey? Thae old Asimov was such a visionary!

[treesareafewofmyfavoritethings]

I've been kind of fascinated with whether it would be possible to quantify 'flow' in team sports and how things like errors can be contagious. I think you get a very clear sense of how a team is working together when you watch them play but I've never seen that aspect broken down and analysed. What are the subtle timing errors and signals that propagate out through players and is it possible to recognise them and enhance the cohesive ones and reduce incohesion.

[bachtran]

But can one apply this research to my FM 24 saves?

[frank]

I find him so relatable for some reason

I think even that reddit mod beard is somewhat relatable, not because it look good, but because we've all taken awful decisions regarding our facial hair at some point

[fromduskuntodawn]

Who wants to watch or play a sport where the players have to be brainless human drones doing what the AI tells each team. Then it’s AI vs AI with meat sacks as the chess pieces. This is going to get dystopian real quick.

[acdc]

How many years away are we from "Lets replace human players with humanoids who can respond better to our AI tactical algorithm providing real time positioning, "velocity" and instructions"? Convince me the game will actually be better with all teams working through tactics generated by machines. We will arrive at a very bland brand of the game where everyone predicts each other and responds accordingly to a dire state - individuality will be punished, collective styles will be punished, unique team compositions will be punished. etc.

Look at what Petar assumes coaches actually do - 17:09 - "It will free up coaches to do LESS of staring at situations and more of the actual creative and actionable decision making part" - He doesn't understand that creativity isn't something you arrive at, its the result of the very process that technology is replacing. Ask an artist if their creativity is truly manifested when they prompt stable diffusion to spit out 20 images in a minute OR when they spend 2 hours painting 1 image? The PROCESS is the creative part. The "Creative Decision Making" IS the result of the boring "Staring at situations" part - without that you might as well give a monkey 4 options to choose from and go from there.

Also, Who would actually enjoy that sanitized version of the sport? Another case of technologists pillaging industries/fields they have no attachment or stake in (so they don't care what they destroy). They're doing it to art, doing it to sport....go solve real problems that are facing humanity - ecological crisis, affordable housing crisis, global energy crisis etc. instead of continuing to destroy the last remaining bastions of human existence & creativity.

AI technologists are the human version of lemurs running us off the cliff. Ask how many technologists studied the humanities alongside their software development, statistics courses etc, next to none. This is why you have technologists who don't understand the social and human impact of the work they are pursuing, more importantly, why they don't care.

Is the technology cool? Sure but just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

[VoidLantadd]

This is a fascinating topic, but it's hard to focus because the greatest mystery is why he decided on that facial hair. I can see where he has stubble on his cheeks and further down his neck, so he could grow a full beard, but he's gone for a ridiculous looking chin strap. He needs to grow it on his cheeks, but most importantly his neckline is WAY too high and it's so bad it's actively distracting.

[MontyCraig]

Next step is to turn these graphs into hypergraphs.

[codevev]

This clearly hasnt helped Liverpool lately 😂

[GCdevine]

This kinda reminds me of what F1 & NASCAR has done to integrate AI into their strategy. It will know the optimal patterns and play styles to counter each opponent. The part that I question is if that is what wins then who is really making the decisions and what would be the point of human coaches?

[gammalgris]

Predicting the future outcome of player setups (players and positions and possible moves) in certain play situations based on past outcomes. Is that what it's about?