M.Eng.

My dissertation in the Computer Engineering course focused in computer games and multi-agent systems.

Title: Tarefa da exploração multi-agente em jogos
(The multi-agent exploration task in computer games)

Abstract

The exploration task may appear in many situations, such as: a multi-robot team that performs planetary exploration and soldiers that try to cover an unknown area in order to map land mines. When the main goal of a agent team is to explore a given terrain, a efficient coordination among them is very important. This work shows the exploration task as a multi-agent problem in a computer game context.

Among the multi-agent coordination techniques, we have considered five of them. The latter techniques were applied to the terrain exploration task in computer games. We have compared and evaluated the performance of each strategy, according to the metrics that we have proposed in this work, in different game scenes. Therefore, we was able to figure out the most suitable strategy to the exploration problem in games. In order to perform the necessary tests, we have developed a simulator, which was able to evaluate and encapsulate various game exploration task applications.

Keywords: Exploration Task, Multiagent Systems, games.