South Korea’s leading science and technology research university KAIST said Wednesday that it will host an “AI World Cup” in which teams of artificially intelligent robots compete in a miniature soccer tournament.

The AI soccer tournament, which the university says will be the first of its kind to take place internationally, will be held Friday at the KI Building in Daejeon.

Teams of five bots employing AI-based machine learning algorithms including Q-Learning -- a reinforcement learning technique used to automatically determine the optimal behavior within a specific context -- will be competing. 

Contrary to some expectations, the AI bots will not be “humanoid robots” that look and act like humans. The bots will come in the form of 7.5-centimeter cubes, passing around a ball of 4.27 cm on a 220-cm-long field, KAIST said.

Eighteen soccer teams will compete. Of them, eight are from KAIST, including one team jointly formed by KAIST and Seoul National University.

The remaining 10 teams come from Mokpo National University, Kyungpook National University, Hanyang University, Chonbuk National University, Yeungnam University, Sungkyunkwan University, Kyung Hee University, Keimyung University and Modu Labs.

The top team in AI soccer will receive a cash prize of 10 million won ($9,240), while the second-place team will be awarded 5 million won. Third and fourth place will each win 1.5 million won.

In addition to soccer, separate teams will compete in the categories of “AI sports commentary” and “AI sports news reporting.”

The commentator bots will be judged by a panel of experts on how accurately and naturally they describe the gameplay and make predictions.

The reporter bots will be evaluated on the accuracy and informative degree of their articles, as well as article structure and readability. They will also be evaluated on how similar their works are to articles produced by human journalists.

The best AI commentator bot will be awarded 2 million won while the top AI reporter bot will receive 1 million won. Four teams are competing in each category, organizers said.

Building on this year’s success, KAIST hopes to launch the same “AI World Cup” on an international level in July 2018, said professor Kim Jong-hwan, dean of KAIST’s College of Engineering and director of the tournament.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)