Intelligent Sports Announcer
Objective
To create an intelligent announcing system for sporting events. Such a system
would see what is going on in the sport and make appropriate comments.
Implementation
The program is written in Borland Pascal 7.0 on a PC.
Details
The Sporting Event
For the Intelligent Sports Announcer (ISA) to work, there must be a sporting
event to watch. In this experiment, the following game will be played.
Puckshot
Background Information. Puckshot is a little like hockey. There are two
teams, each with two players. Each team has a goal, which they protect so the
opposing team doesn't shoot the puck in the goal. Of course, there is also a puck,
which may be possessed by only one player at a time. To steal the puck from
another player, an opponant must run into the puck carrying player. The puck
is then shot from its holder, ready to be picked up by a player from either team.
Shooting the puck into a goal is also done the same way. In other words, there
must be a puck carrying player, and another player to bump the carrying player,
thereby shooting the puck into the goal.
This Implementation. There are two teams: The Easterly Angels and
the Westerly Devils. The Easties are Blue, and the Westerlies are Red.
Scoring. Each time a puck is shot into the opponant's goal, one point
is scored. Each time a puck is shot into the wrong goal, one point is lost.
The game is played up to 10.
Intelligent Announcing
Think about the last time you watched a sporting event. The announcers speak on
any of the following topics:
- Welcome to the game / Leaving the game
- What is happening on the playing field
- A particular player's stats
- General observations made about players
Therefore, to write an intelligent announcer, discussion of these topics must be
mimicked.
Announcing a sporting event is not the most difficult thing in the world. It
is something which would be quite easy to model on a computer.
Welcoming and Leaving
The knowledge of the ISA would contain the following information:
- Various ways of greeting people
- Day, time of day, season, etc.
- Teams playing: Names, nicknames
- Purpose of event (playoff? regular game? warm-ups?)
- What happens if the outcome of the game goes one way or the other