by zaphod » Fri Dec 23, 2011 8:22 pm
Not sure if I have understood it correctly, but seems like a repulsive scent would prevent the ant from moving towards the enemy and take a longer path to the food in your example, which might be a better choice. I was taking the Stanford online class and can recollect a policy function which would consider a bad guy between an agent and a goal state. So looks like the repulsive scent in the diffusion value is a good approximation of such a policy function...
But again, the enemy seems closer to the food than my ant. This case might need to be evaluated differently based on different scenarios. If it is a 2 player game (which might be difficult to detect in the first place) then I guess attacking the enemy would be a better choice than trying to find a path to the food around the enemy. A greedy heuristic (without prediction of future moves) of denying food to the enemy and preferring a 1 v 1 exchange might look like a better strategy at first. However, it might be a bad idea after all, especially considering that the top bots often prefer to avoid 1 v 1 exchanges!