Multi-agent probabilistic smart terrain

Our previous work has added probabilistic reasoning to the “smart terrain” algorithm commonly used for goal-based navigation in games, allowing targets to have a given probability of meeting a character's goals and navigating based on expected distances until goals are met. We now extend it to enable cooperative behavior by a set of characters seeking the same goal (such as a group of guards searching for the player). Each agent computes a global expected distance until goals are met, in terms of its distance to targets it is moving towards and the distances from other agents to targets it is moving away from, and chooses the direction that minimizes this measure. We demonstrate that the algorithm produces plausible cooperative behavior on a set of benchmark examples.