Agentic World Cup Boston: Build AI Agents That Play Soccer

We propose a half-day Agentic Football Cup hackathon during Boston AI Week 2026 — a proven, globally-run AWS workshop (100+ events, rated 4.8/5) where participants build a squad of five autonomous AI agents using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and the Strands Agents SDK, then compete in live 5v5 AI football matches on a real-time leaderboard. Participants write the strategy; their agents play the match. Five autonomous AI agents per team make decisions every two seconds — passing, shooting, pressing, and defending — with no human input once the whistle blows. This isn't a demo you watch; it's a working system you build and deploy in an afternoon. Every 2 seconds, the game server emits a decision point and calls all 10 agents in parallel with the full game state. Each agent has 1 second to return one of eleven structured commands: ``` MOVE_TO | PASS | SHOOT | DRIBBLE | PRESS_BALL | MARK | INTERCEPT | TACKLE | CLEAR | IDLE | (GK actions) ``` Miss the deadline → your player IDLEs for that tick. The match doesn't pause. This hard latency contract mirrors real production agentic workloads. The thing participants tune is almost never the code — it's the prompt and the model choice: - System prompt encodes team tactics ("press high, favor through-balls, shoot from distance") - Model selection balances reasoning depth vs. latency budget - Structured output schema bounds the action space Teams of 2–4 (form on-site or pre-register) - No AI/ML experience needed — the workshop is designed for developers of all levels - Non-technical teammates welcome (naming the squad, picking formation, trash talk) Every team that completes the workshop qualifies for the Agentic Football Cup global league. Group winners fly to Las Vegas to compete live on stage at AWS re:Invent. This Boston AI Week event is their qualifying round. This creates a unique draw: participants aren't just attending a workshop — they're entering a global competition with a trip to Vegas on the line.