License

Engineering

Football

Operating system

Set (abstract data type)

Computer science

Reinforcement learning

Political science

Artificial intelligence

Virtual machine

Structural engineering

Programming language

Human–computer interaction

Reinforcement

Multimedia

Recent progress in the field of reinforcement learning has been accelerated by virtual learning environments such as video games, where novel algorithms and ideas can be quickly tested in a safe and reproducible manner. We introduce the Google Research Football Environment, a new reinforcement learning environment where agents are trained to play football in an advanced, physics-based 3D simulator. The resulting environment is challenging, easy to use and customize, and it is available under a permissive open-source license. In addition, it provides support for multiplayer and multi-agent experiments. We propose three full-game scenarios of varying difficulty with the Football Benchmarks and report baseline results for three commonly used reinforcement algorithms (IMPALA, PPO, and Ape-X DQN). We also provide a diverse set of simpler scenarios with the Football Academy and showcase several promising research directions.

Google Research Football: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Environment