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Contents Domain Illustration Methods Conclusions
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Domain The domain of APSC is a virtual 60 feet 6 inches between a pitcher and his catcher. The game of baseball is full of subtle strategy that often is unforseen by the casual fan or onlooker. The most impacting aspect of playing the game, however, starts from the pitcher's mound. In most cases, a team with the better pitcher usually ends up winning the game. As the baseball cliche goes, "good pitching beats good hitting." This past season of 1999, the Atlanta Braves proved to be as consistent a team as ever due to their potent pitching staff once nicknamed, "The Five Aces." Their loss in the World Series came due to another team with potent pitching, the New York Yankees. The common signal caller in a game is usually the catcher. That would make this agent an ABC (Artificial Baseball Catcher). But this agent doesn't worry about the other duties of a catcher. This is the agent pitching against a right-handed batter by starting out with a hard fastball, and tries to throw the hitter off rhythm by throwing changeups and changing locations. The agent is also aware that throwing inside to right-handers is a dangerous move.
| ?- start. Ultimately the hitter strikes out. The agent uses three basic pitches of an assumed right handed hurler: fastball, curveball, and changeup. It decides what to throw and where to throw it based on the type of hitter and the pitching count, and then asks what happened to update itself on results. The pitching decisions in this are generalized for a common hitter under common circumstances. There are other factors in the usual flow of events. A light hitting batter who usually poses very little threat would be fed a barrage of fastballs down the middle. A situation with a runner on first with no outs with the team behind by one run in the late innings would usually indicate that the hitter would bunt in order to advance the runner. The main strategy against that is to throw a high hard fastball. What this agent achieves can still be applied for any case, however, to a slightly lesser success rate. |