Artificial intelligence has just surpassed yet another impressive milestone by inventing a new team sport – and it’s apparently pretty fun.

The new game, which is being called Speedgate, is being hailed as the first sport ever designed by artificial intelligence.

It was developed as a side project by Portland-based innovation agency AKQA. The designers started their labor of love by feeding hundreds of various sports-related rules and phrases into an AI program. Then, they uploaded the rules of 400 different world sports into the program for analysis.

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Upon asking the AI to interpret the data, it regurgitated more than a few interesting concepts.

The AKQA designers interpreted 1,000 different ideas and outlines that were drawn out by the program – and while many of them were amusing to imagine, the team says that they wanted the AI to help develop a game that was not only fun and easy to understand, but also active and accessible.

The team eventually narrowed it down to ten possible sports ideas before field-testing three of them – and Speedgate was the winner.

AKQA says that the AI-developed game combines elements of croquet, rugby, and soccer. Though the designers had to fill in some of the gaps in the program’s language, the AI is responsible for most of Speedgate’s rulebook.

“Using AI as a member of a creative team takes us to a new place that we never could have gotten to without it,” says Whitney Jenkins, creative director of AKQA.

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For starters, the game is played with two teams of six players. The objective of the game is for the teams to try and score points by getting the ball through their own goal posts on the playing field; however, a team can only score if they are first able to get the ball through the posts in the center of the field. Players in possession of the ball are not allowed to move, but they are able to pass the ball to other players so long as the ball is passed from below the waist.

The sport has since been recognized by the Oregon Sports Authority, and AKQA says that leagues are already being formed around the world, from Malta to Mozambique.

If you want to get a gang of friends together to start playing in your own backyard, you can check out the full rulebook on the Speedgate website.

(WATCH Speedgate in action below) – Photos by AKQA

This is Speedgate from AKQA on Vimeo.

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