Introduction
The world cup just started and in light of that fact I decided to find an article that applies game theory to football/soccer. For the rest of the blog post I will be referring to the sport as soccer, only because the article I have chosen is doing that (please don’t get mad at me).
What is the RoboCup?
The RoboCup Federation has been facilitating a league for many years in which people can design robots and artificial intelligence to compete in soccer matches at various tournaments. Over the years teams have developed strategies to improve the decision making skills of their robots through many algorithms, one of which seems to be the application of game theory in the decision making process.
Game Theory in the RoboCup
The paper provides definitions and syntax for games and their variables as follows: 
and proceeds to define Nash Equillibrium as we have defined in the course. Generally, the robots also note the strategies of other robots to avoid Prisoners Dilemma in their games. The paper then goes on to define a task allocation algorithm that enhances the robots decision making ability using the game theoretic approach. The article describes the Game Theory based multi-robot system task allocation method (GT-MRTA) which was compared to other task allocation algorithms to test its effectiveness.
This algorithm is broken down into 3 parts, task decomposition, utility evaluation (payoffs) and task selection.
When compared to other task allocation algorithms the GT-MRTA the author concluded that the algorithm has low complexity, low computational time and shows strong scalability to different situations and games. Here is an example of one of their experiments involving communication failure between robots.
Conclusion
Clearly game theory has applications in many different places and can be used to strategize solutions to a plethora of problems in the world. In this article we saw the power of generating an algorithm based on game theory and how it can give you the advantage over your opponents in robot soccer.
Citation
Li, P., & Zhu, J. Y. (2014). The Application of Game Theory in RoboCup Soccer Game. Applied Mechanics and Materials, 530-531(Advances in Measurements and Information Technologies), 1053–1057. https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.530-531.1053
https://www.robocup.org/