Why in News? Google’s DeepMind has introduced TacticAI that can provide experts with tactical insights, particularly on corner kicks.

What is TacticAI? It is a predictive and generative AI tool that uses a geometric deep learning approach to help create more generalizable models, allow coaches to effectively sample and explore alternative player setups for each corner kick and to select those with highest predicted likelihood of success.

Working- It represents corner kick situations as graphs, with players depicted as nodes and their relationships as edges. A neural network then operates over this graph, updating each node’s representation. This enables modelling the interactions between players, which may be more important than the absolute distances between them.

Why Specifically Corners- An average Champions League game sees about 10 corner kicks, and predicting their outcomes is complex, given the randomness in gameplay from individual players, and dynamics among them. Corner kicks are apt for strategizing using AI tools as the game is effectively frozen at that moment and always starts from the same corner position, giving the players an immediate opportunity to score. For every corner kick, AI can help- 1) understand what will happen and what happened; and 2) how to adjust tactics to make a particular outcome happen.

Benefits of AI in Sports- Sports such as football are a dynamic domain for developing AI, as they feature real-world, multi-agent interactions, with multimodal data. While TacticAI essentially demonstrates the potential of assistive AI techniques to revolutionize sports for players, coaches, and fans, advancing AI for sports could potentially translate into actionable models in many areas off the field as well from computer games and robotics to traffic coordination.