Speaker
David JT Sumpter
(Uppsala University, Sweden)
Description
Football is the most mathematical of sports. Passing
networks, the geometry of player positioning and randomness
are all important. There are lots of people—coaches and
players---who understand football intuitively. Can we train
a computer to understand the game and generate insights
these people have missed? I argue that we can, but we can’t
just throw away these people’s knowledge and start from
scratch. I explain how studies of collective behaviour can
be used to help improve our analysis and understanding of
the beautiful game, and how the problem of modelling
football should inform the way we approach all complex systems.
