Collaborative Diffusion

Collaborative Diffusion is a pathfinding algorithm developed by Alexander Repenning of AgentSheets Inc. and the University of Colorado. Rather than having each moving agent compute its own path, the background tiles of the environment, termed antiobjects, perform the path calculations and effectively guide the agents toward a target. The best-known example is the ghost behavior in Pac-Man, and the technique is well suited to games where many agents pursue the same target, since the time needed to compute paths stays roughly constant as the number of agents grows, an advantage over per-agent search methods such as A*; it also makes it straightforward to mix cooperative and competitive behavior among the pursuing agents.