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?

Darnell Clayton has edited the Carnival of Space 89 on the Moon Society.

According to Darnell the Moon Society is:

An organization dedicated to motivating the masses to reclaim our lunar heritage (which was laid down by our forefathers many moons ago--pun intended).

I very much recommend a surf of the carnival. It is always very interesting. In terms of verity and quality the Carnival of Space is one of the best carnivals I see.

Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have discovered an unexpected cosmic background radio noise. The team led by Alan Kogut, have been examining data from a balloon-borne instrument named the Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE).

"The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut says. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted." The source of this noise is unknown.

ARCADE was launched in July 2006 and flew to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. Here it searched for signs of the first stars formed about 13 billion years ago. It found a cosmic puzzle.

"This is what makes science so exciting," says Michael Seiffert, a team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "You start out on a path to measure something -- in this case, the heat from the very first stars -- but run into something else entirely, something unexplained."

ARCADE viewed about 7 percent of the sky. The observed region is coloured on this all-sky radio map. The plane of our galaxy runs across the centre.

Image Credits: NASA/ARCADE