The Evolution of Sporting Strategies

This paper describes C oac H, an evolutionary simulator developed to investigate strategies for teams in a competitive environment, and discusses some of the issues surrounding the evolution of cooperation among team members. As its title suggests, C oac H is a simulator of sporting environments, as these possess the required motivations for such behaviour and have the potential to beneet the real sporting world. In addition to describing C oac H, this paper describes two applications illustrating the potential and value of the system. It examines cooperation within a simpliied model of the game of volleyball in which cooperation emerged in the form of players passing the ball between them in order to control it for an eeective ooensive hit. Each player learnt a specialized skill which, in close harmony with the other team member's skills, provided the team with a strategy not unlike those used by real volleyball players. Some preliminary experiments were also carried out to investigate communication among team members.