In our office, we regularly enjoy some rounds of foosball / table football after work. I have put together a small java program that generates random 2vs2 lineups from the available players and stores the match results in a database afterwards.
The current prediction of the outcome uses a simple average of all previous match results from the 4 involved players. This gives a very rough estimation, but I'd like to replace it with something more sophisticated, taking into account things like:
players may be good playing as attacker but bad as defender (or vice versa)
players do well against a specific opponent / bad against others
some teams work well together, others don't
skills change over time
What would be the best algorithm to predict the game outcome as accurately as possible?
Someone suggested using a neural network for this, which sounds quite interesting... but I do not have enough knowledge on the topic to say if that could work, and I also suspect it might take too many games to be reasonably trained.
EDIT:
Had to take a longer break from this due to some project deadlines. To make the question more specific:
Given the following mysql table containing all matches played so far:
table match_result
match_id int pk
match_start datetime
duration int (match length in seconds)
blue_defense int fk to table player
blue_attack int fk to table player
red_defense int fk to table player
red_attack int fk to table player
score_blue int
score_red int
How would you write a function predictResult(blueDef, blueAtk, redDef, redAtk) {...}
to estimate the outcome as closely as possible, executing any sql, doing calculations or using external libraries?
