Silver Medal in the Technical Challenge Goes to FRA-UNIted
The technical committee of the soccer simulation 2D league had decided to evaluate the question which teams feature the most general style of playing. Over the years, many teams have come to specialize and tailor their team's playing behavior depending on the respective opponent team. This can be done easily when the other opponent's team name is known. In order to evaluate the generality of the participating teams, in this challenge all team names were scrambled, i.e. set to random values, such that no team could know against which other team it is playing. As a consequence, it is no longer possible to use certain "special features" that were implemented for some particular opponent.
This competition was held in the form of a huge round-robin tournament involving 120 games. We were happy to see our team FRA-UNIted (36 points) becoming runner-up in this interesting competition just beaten by two points by Helios (JPN). This is a strong evidence that our team's overall playing behavior is hardly over-specialized to certain opponent teams and instead rather general.
The picture above is a screenshot from RoboCup's award ceremony which, of course, took place virtually as well. We gratefully overlook the little typo in our team name, since the result slides had to be prepared in very short time by the organizers and the organizers really did an excellent job in running RoboCup 2021 as a pure online event for the first (and hopefully last) time. A recording of the award ceremony can be found here.