Google's DeepMind is planning to introduce AI to football and launch a new tool to help coaches make better tactical decisions.

Last month, as part of a three-year partnership with Liverpool Football Club, the Premier League football club, DeepMind releasedPennpursuit3leThe prototype of TacticAI. Football experts involved in the project believe that the AI system has surpassed humans in designing offensive and defensive positional ball plans. The AI system is trained using the data set of more than 7000 corner kicks in the Premier League.

"for me, the most exciting thing about football is that it is a game between art and science," Zhe Wang, one of the TacticAI project directors, said in an interview. There is a lot of randomness in the game, but we can still use the data to make better decisions. "

In the modern history of football, some of the most iconic goals came from corners. Petar Veli "kovi", a DeepMind research scientist, says it makes sense to use data from corner kicks to train TacticAI, which tends to lead to more organized attacks. He said: "Football is super unpredictable.Pennpursuit3leYou can never predict exactly what will happen. But what you can do is to develop a reasonable tactical model, and corners are really good for it because they are fixed, frequent and bring goal opportunities. "

On the other hand, TacticAI can advise coaches on the best position for players to attack and defend corners, which may bring marginal benefits (marginal gains) to their teams, which often make a big difference in competitive sports.

TacticAI was developed by DeepMind in partnership with Liverpool Football Club. Veli "kovi" said Liverpool team experts helped DeepMind determine whether TacticAI's corner kick was effective, while the two teams collaborated on a broader study of AI's role in football and in recent years set up a system to predict players' off-camera movements.

The release of TacticAI marks the end of a partnership between DeepMind and Liverpool, but researchers believe executives at some top clubs are only just beginning to realize that AI could play a transformative role in football.

Like corner kicks, other set-pieces, including free kicks, foul kicks and penalties, have structured data that AI is good at and could be the next area for researchers in the industry, they say.

At the same time, some purists are beginning to worry that such technical intervention may one day make football games less fun. But the researchers stress that they are trying to create a tool to make life easier for coaches, rather than putting them out of work.

"We are not going to replace human coaches," Zhe Wang said. Instead, we want to help them make faster and better decisions; help them find patterns and find possible improvements through AI. In the final analysis, it is up to the coach to decide. It's just a tool to help coaches make these decisions in a more comprehensive way. "