Paper Accepted at RoboCup Symposium 2016
A remarkable feature of RoboCup's soccer simulation leagues is their ability to quantify and prove the exact progress made over years, given that no major changes are introduced into the simulation software. In the 2D league, we recently had this kind of stable platform, which allowed us to perform an extensive empirical study of the progress and the currently reached state of 2D soccer simulation. In our contribution to 2016's RoboCup symposium, entitled "Progress in RoboCup Revisited: The State of Soccer Simulation 2D", we present and discuss the most important results of this study. Moreover, we envision possible future prospects for the 2D league that might respond to our empirical findings.
The most important conclusions from our study are: (1) The 2D soccer simulation league has made significant progress during the recent years which we were able to quantify numerically thanks to fact that the software platform has been kept stable from 2010 to 2015. (2) When compared to an earlier stable period (2003-2007) the magnitude of the progress made has been much smaller. (3) The league is currently strongly dominated by a very small set of teams making it rather difficult for new teams to catch up. However, so far we do not find evidence for incestuous overfitting team strategies. For more details, please refer to the publications section.