# Gliders2d: Source Code Base for RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation League

## TL;DR

Gliders2d is a source code base for RoboCup 2D soccer simulation teams, demonstrating evolutionary improvements in agent behavior that enhance team performance and mobility, with potential applicability to physical robots.

## Contribution

This paper introduces Gliders2d, a new base code for RoboCup soccer simulation, showing how incremental evolutionary modifications significantly improve agent performance.

## Key findings

- Performance increased by four goals per game on average.
- Sequential evolutionary steps improved agent behavior.
- Methodology demonstrates effective human-based evolutionary computation.

## Abstract

We describe Gliders2d, a base code release for Gliders, a soccer simulation team which won the RoboCup Soccer 2D Simulation League in 2016. We trace six evolutionary steps, each of which is encapsulated in a sequential change of the released code, from v1.1 to v1.6, starting from agent2d-3.1.1 (set as the baseline v1.0). These changes improve performance by adjusting the agents' stamina management, their pressing behaviour and the action-selection mechanism, as well as their positional choice in both attack and defense, and enabling riskier passes. The resultant behaviour, which is sufficiently generic to be applicable to physical robot teams, increases the players' mobility and achieves a better control of the field. The last presented version, Gliders2d-v1.6, approaches the strength of Gliders2013, and outperforms agent2d-3.1.1 by four goals per game on average. The sequential improvements demonstrate how the methodology of human-based evolutionary computation can markedly boost the overall performance with even a small number of controlled steps.