June 30, 2002
the wcf
The World Cup Final is over, with the disappointing result that the Brazilians are once again the world champions. And Germany played so well (except for those two little goals of Ronaldo's) that you really can't feel ashamed of them. For the most part they controlled the ball. Their style is not Brazil's--the Germans favor a slowly developing attack, strategy, the artillery shelling of Kahn's kicks from the backfield establishing forward positions. You can see the Panzers rolling in. Brazil, on the other hand, has a completely different approach that relies on explosive attacks which one doesn't see coming, and raw speed.
Training a soccer team for the World Cup must be a bit like programming a Robocode robot. Robocode comes with many standard robots like Crazy, Ramfire, Walls, etc., each of which have their own specialized strategies. When I started writing Robocode robots I quickly discovered how to beat Crazy, Ramfire, and Walls, but couldn't beat all of them all the time with the same robot. The Robocode sample robots are essentially a test suite (like de Jong's test suite is for optimization algorithms), and if you can beat them all with the same robot then you may have a world champion on your hands. It's the same with soccer teams. Germany handled many different strategies well, including the overly aggressive strategy of the U.S., but hadn't quite figured out how to defuse the Brazilian bomb every time.
Anyway, after the game we saw this on the ground in the English gardens, and I think it pretty much sums up the post-game feeling.
