The Predator's Purpose: Intention Perception in Simulated Agent Environments

Amani R. Maina-Kilaas, Cynthia Hom, Kevin Ginta, George D. Montañez

Abstract: We evaluate the benefits of intention perception, the ability of an agent to perceive the intentions and plans of others, in improving a software agent’s survival likelihood in a simulated virtual environment. To model intention perception, we set up a multi-agent predator and prey model, where the prey agents search for food and the predator agents seek to eat the prey. We then analyze the difference in average survival rates between prey with intention perception—knowledge of which predators are targeting them—and those without. We find that intention perception provides significant survival advantages in almost all cases tested, agreeing with other recent studies investigating intention perception in adversarial situations and environmental danger assessment.