The Evolution of Sporting Strategies
Complexity International, (April 1995)Abstract
This paper describes CoacH, an evolutionary simulator
developed to investigate strategies for teams in a
competitive environment, and discusses some of the
issues surrounding the evolution of co-operation among
team members. As its title suggests, CoacH is a
simulator of sporting environments, as these possess
the required motivations for such behaviour and have
the potential to benefit the real sporting world. In
addition to describing CoacH, this paper describes two
applications illustrating the potential and value of
the system. It examines co-operation within a
simplified model of the game of volleyball in which
co-operation emerged in the form of players passing the
ball between them in order to control it for an
effective offensive hit. Each player learnt a
specialised skill which, in close harmony with the
other team member's skills, provided the team with a
strategy not unlike those used by real volleyball
players. Some preliminary experiments were also carried
out to investigate communication among team members.