Evolving Team Darwin United
The RoboCup simulator competition is one of the most challenging international proving grounds for contemporary AI research. Exactly because of the high level of complexity and a lack of reliable strategic guidelines, the pervasive attitude has been that the problem can most successfully be attacked by human expertise, possibly assisted by some level of machine learning. This led, in RoboCup'97, to a field of simulator teams all of whose level and style of play were heavily influenced by the human designers of those teams. In contrast, our 1998 team was "designed" entirely by the process of genetic programming. Our evolved team placed in the middle of the pack at Robocup98, despite the fact that it was largely machine learned rather than hand coded. This paper presents our motivation, our approach, and the specific construction of our team that created itself from scratch.