Hoang Le has been a soccer fan all his life — his childhood hero was Zinedine Zidane, and as a recent immigrant from Spain, he thinks FC Barcelona's Lionel Messi is the best player who's ever lived. He knows the game inside and out, but in order to teach a computer how to play the beautiful game, Le and his team at CalTech were recently forced to release their authoritative control, and take a step away from the teaching process.
It turned out that the expertise that comes with fandom was irrelevant to a computer. The team's study, published in March shows that while a machine learning approach can let a computer discern the real principles of soccer, it might nonetheless require the human soccer experts to take a reliable step back from the process.
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