Should be much cheaper to run despite being a physics simulation:
"The Football Engine is written in highly optimized C++ code, allowing it to be run on off-the-shelf machines, both with GPU and without GPU-based rendering enabled. This allows it to reach a performance of approximately 25 million steps per day on a single hexa-core machine."
Also has some features geared towards generalization, and benchmarking:
"With the Football Benchmarks, we propose a set of benchmark problems for RL research based on the Football Engine. The goal in these benchmarks is to play a “standard” game of football against a fixed rule-based opponent that was hand-engineered for this purpose. We provide three versions: the Football Easy Benchmark, the Football Medium Benchmark, and the Football Hard Benchmark, which only differ in the strength of the opponent. "
"As training agents for the full Football Benchmarks can be challenging, we also provide Football Academy, a diverse set of scenarios of varying difficulty. This allows researchers to get the ball rolling on new research ideas, allows testing of high-level concepts (such as passing), and provides a foundation to investigate curriculum learning research ideas, where agents learn from progressively harder scenarios."
So, as compared to SC2/Dota, you can train much faster, with good baselines to benchmark or compete again, and already built-in support for curriculum learning. SC2/Dota weren't designed for RL, so they're just harder to work with in RL - SC2 has a curriculum which was added on afterwards, for example (the minigames), but Dota2 still doesn't.
Soccer is also more popular than either SC2/DoTA2 as well, so that may be a draw for researchers. More interesting to work on something you like and already know about.
Dunno if all of that together is enough to make it a worthwhile testbed, but it's not obviously worthless or redundant.
This allows it to reach a performance of approximately 25 million steps per day on a single hexa-core machine."
That is 24 steps per second per thread (or 48 per core).
This doesn't seem that impressive: much more complex games run at that frame rate? FIFA games from the 90s don't look much worse and certainly achieved those frame rates on much older hardware.
Comments
Should be much cheaper to run despite being a physics simulation:
"The Football Engine is written in highly optimized C++ code, allowing it to be run on off-the-shelf machines, both with GPU and without GPU-based rendering enabled. This allows it to reach a performance of approximately 25 million steps per day on a single hexa-core machine."
Also has some features geared towards generalization, and benchmarking:
"With the Football Benchmarks, we propose a set of benchmark problems for RL research based on the Football Engine. The goal in these benchmarks is to play a “standard” game of football against a fixed rule-based opponent that was hand-engineered for this purpose. We provide three versions: the Football Easy Benchmark, the Football Medium Benchmark, and the Football Hard Benchmark, which only differ in the strength of the opponent. "
"As training agents for the full Football Benchmarks can be challenging, we also provide Football Academy, a diverse set of scenarios of varying difficulty. This allows researchers to get the ball rolling on new research ideas, allows testing of high-level concepts (such as passing), and provides a foundation to investigate curriculum learning research ideas, where agents learn from progressively harder scenarios."
So, as compared to SC2/Dota, you can train much faster, with good baselines to benchmark or compete again, and already built-in support for curriculum learning. SC2/Dota weren't designed for RL, so they're just harder to work with in RL - SC2 has a curriculum which was added on afterwards, for example (the minigames), but Dota2 still doesn't.
Soccer is also more popular than either SC2/DoTA2 as well, so that may be a draw for researchers. More interesting to work on something you like and already know about.
Dunno if all of that together is enough to make it a worthwhile testbed, but it's not obviously worthless or redundant.
That is 24 steps per second per thread (or 48 per core).
This doesn't seem that impressive: much more complex games run at that frame rate? FIFA games from the 90s don't look much worse and certainly achieved those frame rates on much older hardware.
Most of them aren't necessarily trying for realistic physics simulations (they're games, not simulations).