Strategic team AI path plans: probabilistic pathfinding

John, Tng C. H., Prakash, Edmond C. and Chaudhari, Narendra S. (2008) Strategic team AI path plans: probabilistic pathfinding. International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2008. p. 834616. ISSN 1687-7055

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Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method to generate strategic team AI pathfinding plans for computer games and simulations using probabilistic pathfinding. This method is inspired by genetic algorithms (Russell and Norvig, 2002), in that, a fitness function is used to test the quality of the path plans. The method generates high-quality path plans by eliminating the low-quality ones. The path plans are generated by probabilistic pathfinding, and the elimination is done by a fitness test of the path plans. This path plan generation method has the ability to generate variation or different high-quality paths, which is desired for games to increase replay values. This work is an extension of our earlier work on team AI: probabilistic pathfinding (John et al., 2006). We explore ways to combine probabilistic pathfinding and genetic algorithm to create a new method to generate strategic team AI pathfinding plans.