A recent competition pitting Artificial Intelligences (AI) against each other has been won by a system designed to take free kicks like a professional soccer player.

Martin Rhodes and Simon Coupland from De Montfort University, England, developed the "Pro Evolutionary Soccer" AI. In the competition, they presented a 15-minute demonstration of free kicks taken within a soccer simulation. Several of the examples were based on real free kicks, including one by LA Galaxy and England free kick specialist, David Beckham.

Whilst players like Beckham use years of experience to judge the spin and power to place on a ball, the AI creates many solutions and tests them to see which are most likely to give a goal.

The AI rejects obvious failures, slightly alters the best and then uses these altered solutions as input for the the next generation of calculations. This way the system “evolves” a solution. A process known as an evolutionary algorithm.

The developers see an application in video games. They say:

The current generation of football video games suffers from a predictable, repetitive style of gameplay. Pro-Evolutionary soccer uses a stochastic approach to give varied, organic style of play in the form of free-kick taking. Given a physics model and the positions of the opposing team, our system finds a near optimal free kick from all possible free kicks giving a varied and challenging gameplay.

Pro Evolutionary Soccer faced some tough competition. Other competitors included a robot that can locate and then follow a person in a complex environment and an AI avatar called Halo, who lives in Second Life.

Have you met Halo yet?
Did you realize you were interacting with an AI?

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is something I have often encountered, but never mastered. It was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. As it allows the user to define the mark-up elements, it is an extensible language.

Like most developers I have a working knowledge of HTML, which is an XML developed to define the layout of web pages. But XML has far more uses than just a way of defining pretty internet sites. Its purpose is to allow information systems to share structured data. It can be used to define data structures, as well as the data.

Tools, such as XQuery can be used to query these XML data structures in a similar way to SQL can be used to query a relational database. Many popular internet applications, such as the Wordpress blogging application this site uses, use XML.

I am definitely not an XML superstar by any stretch of the imagination. Do you think you could be? IDUG want to increase awareness and familiarity with XQuery, XML and DB2. So they are sponsoring a contest, open to students, professional and hobbyist developers alike.

There are five separate tracks, so you are bound to find something that suits you. You can enter one or more tracks, up to all five.

• Video Contest: Upload a video, judged by the community, prizes awarded monthly.
• Gadget Contest: Create a small widget or gadget, judged by the community, prizes awarded monthly.
• XQuery Challenge: Answer a series of questions by developing queries in XQuery. All correct answers (answer and query structure) entered to win larger prizes.
• Port an Application: Port an existing application to use XML, XQuery or DB2. Judged by a panel of judges.
• Develop an application: Develop a brand new application using XML and/or XQuery. Judged by a panel of judges

You Can Do It!

Don't hide your light under a bushel, gain recognition for your hard won skills. Step up for your chance to win thousands of dollars in prizes ranging from Wiis to complimentary places at technical conferences. Go to the XML Challenge site now to enter the competition.