sillygwailo

“ Usually the technique involves creating many small “antiobject” objects, for the Pac-Man example, one antiobject per background tile is created. Each of these antiobjects or agents has an identical and simple algorithm which it runs at every turn of the game. Instead of making Ghosts smart enough to solve “shortest path” problems around the maze, a notion of “Pac-Man scent” is created instead and each tile is responsible for saying how much Pac-Man scent is on its tile. Using Alan Turing’s reaction-diffusion equation this turns out to be a simple distributed solution which runs on each instance of tile. The tile asks other objects or antiobjects located on top of it for their Pac-Man scent value, then it asks its 4 nearest tiles for their scent. Lastly, given these inputs, it solves the differential equation, which simulates the spread of Pac-Man scent. Note that the walls of the maze, and Ghosts themselves, all block the diffusion of Pac-Man scent. These local differences affect the outcome of each tile’s amount of scent and always provide a gradient that leads to Pac-Man. Besides the reaction-diffusion equation, no difficult algorithms, such as topology problems, are needed, yet a correct and accurate solution emerges. The Ghosts are given a simple hill climbing algorithm to walk towards higher quantities of Pac-Man scent. ” - Antiobjects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia via al3x.