Improving Offensive Performance through Opponent Modeling
Abstract
Although in theory opponent modeling can be useful in any adversarial domain, in practice it is both difficult to do accurately and to use effectively to improve game play. In this paper, we present an approach for online opponent modeling and illustrate how it can be used to improve offensive performance in the Rush 2008 football game. In football, team behaviors have an observable spatio-temporal structure, defined by the relative physical positions of team members over time we demonstrate that this structure can be exploited to recognize football plays at a very early stage of the play using a supervised learning method. Based on the teams' play history our system evaluates the competitive advantage of executing a play switch based on the potential of other plays to increase the yardage gained and the similarity of the candidate plays to the current play. In this paper, we investigate two types of play switches: (1) whole team and (2) subgroup switching. Both types of play switches improve offensive performance but by only modifying the behavior of a key subgroup of offensive players, we improve on the yardage gained.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA593083
Entities
People
- David W. Aha
- Gita Sukthankar
- Kennard Laviers
- Matthew Molineaux
Organizations
- Knexus Research (United States)