Collaborative Diffusion is a type of

pathfinding Pathfinding or pathing is the plotting, by a computer application, of the shortest route between two points. It is a more practical variant on solving mazes. This field of research is based heavily on Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the sh ...

algorithm which uses the concept of ''antiobjects'', objects within a computer program that function opposite to what would be conventionally expected. Collaborative Diffusion is typically used in video games, when multiple agents must path towards a single target agent. For example, the ghosts in

Pac-Man originally called ''Puck Man'' in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. Th ...

. In this case, the background tiles serve as antiobjects, carrying out the necessary calculations for creating a path and having the foreground objects react accordingly, whereas having foreground objects be responsible for their own pathing would be conventionally expected. Collaborative Diffusion is favored for its efficiency over other pathfinding algorithms, such as A*, when handling multiple agents. Also, this method allows elements of competition and teamwork to easily be incorporated between tracking agents. Notably, the time taken to calculate paths remains constant as the number of agents increases.

References

Algorithms {{algorithm-stub