Developing an AI system to pick a fantasy football team

Question

I'm looking to build an AI system to "pick" a fantasy football team. I have only basic knowledge of AI techniques (especially when it comes to game theory), so I am looking for advice on what techniques could be used to accomplish this and pointers to some reading materials.

I am aware that this may be a very difficult or maybe even impossible task for AI to accurately complete: however I am not too concerned on the accuracy, rather I am interested in learning some AI and this seems like a fun way to apply it.

Some basic facts about the game:

• A team of 14 players must be picked
• There is a limit on the total cost of players picked
• The players picked must adhere to a certain configuration (there must always be one goalkeeper, at least two defenders, one midfielder and one forward)
• The team may be altered on a weekly basis but removing/adding more than one player a week will inccur a penalty

P.S. I have stats on every match played in last season, could this be used to train the AI system?

Answer 1

This is interesting.

So if you didn't really care about accuracy at all, you could just come up with some heuristic for the quality of a team. For instance, assign a point value to each player and then try to maximize it using dynamic programming. Something like: http://www.cse.unl.edu/~goddard/Courses/CSCE310J/Lectures/Lecture8-DynamicProgramming.pdf

This would be similar to the knapsack problem.

Technically this is AI since a computer is deciding something but maybe not what you had in mind.

You sound like you want a learning AI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) which is an interesting field. Here's how you can approach the problem.

Define your inputs. Right now you have last years data. You'll probably want data on many years. Also, you might be able to include the ranking of pundits, maybe a bunch of magazines rank players or something, that seems useful as well.

Take your inputs and feed them into some machine learning algorithm for each season. Wikipedia will help you out there.

Essentially, for each season you'll want to feed in your data, have your AI pick a team, and then rate the performance of the team based on the seasons results.

Keep doing this and maybe your bot will get better at picking teams, and you can apply to this year's data.

(If you only have last year's data, it's okay to train the algorithm with just that but your AI will probably be over trained on that one set and won't be as accurate.)

This was just a sketch of how it might look. For a romp into AI, this problem is probably pretty hard so don't feel disheartened if it seems overwhelming at first.