The RoboCup-97 simulator competition was the first formal simulated robotic soccer competition. It was held on August 23-29, 1997 in Nagoya, Japan in conjunction with the IJCAI-97 conference [#!RoboCup97-proceedings!#]. With 29 teams entering from all around the world, it was a very successful tournament.
The winning teams were entered by:
In this competition, the champion team exhibited clearly superior low-level skills. One of its main advantages in this regard was its ability to kick the ball harder than any other team. Its players did so by kicking the ball around themselves, continually increasing its velocity so that it ended up moving towards the goal faster than was imagined possible. Since the soccerserver did not (at that time) enforce a maximum ball speed, a property that was changed immediately after the competition, the ball could move arbitrarily fast, making it almost impossible to stop. With this advantage at the low-level behavior level, no team, regardless of how strategically sophisticated, was able to defeat the eventual champion.
At RoboCup-97, the RoboCup scientific challenge award was introduced. Its purpose is to recognize scientific research results regardless of performance in the competitions. The 1997 award went to Sean Luke [#!luke1997:genetic!#] of the University of Maryland "for demonstrating the utility of evolutionary approach by co-evolving soccer teams in the simulator league."