The Hero's Dilemma: Survival Advantages of Intention Perception in Virtual Agent Games

• Published in: 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Maina-Kilaas, Amani R., Montanez, George D., Hom, Cynthia, Ginta, Kevin, Lay, Cindy
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 17.08.2021
• Subjects: awareness; Conferences; Games; intention perception; intention trilogy; Limiting; noncooperative game theory; simulation
• ISSN: 2325-4289
• DOI: 10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9619071

Conjecturing that an agent's ability to perceive the intentions of others can increase its chances of survival, we introduce a simple game, the Hero's Dilemma, which simulates interactions between two virtual agents to investigate whether an agent's ability to detect the intentional stance of a second agent provides a measurable survival advantage. We test whether agents able to make decisions based on the perceived intention of an adversarial agent have advantages over agents without such perception, but who instead rely on a variety of different game-playing strategies. In the game, an agent must decide whether to remain hidden or attack an often more powerful agent based on the perceived intention of the other agent. We compare the survival rates of agents with and without intention perception, and find that intention perception provides significant survival advantages and is the most successful strategy in the majority of situations tested.