I'm looking to buy one or more books on AI. Specifically, I want books with ample information on pathfinding. I know A*, waypoints, etc; it's okay if the books cover that, but it's not what I'm looking for. I'm more interested in a full treatment of multi-agent cooperative pathfinding, such as collision avoidance, arbitration, and resolution. Ideally, I'd like that treatment to go beyond flocking behaviors. In the game I'm developing, a large number of agents are going to be doing pathfinding in a fairly restricted space, so my pathfinding needs to be robust and efficient even in crowded environments. Has anyone come across books with a good treatment of this stuff?

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
Has anyone come across books with a good treatment of this stuff?

Not personally, no. There is plenty of research literature out there, but I haven't seen a particularly useful book as yet... I'd be interested to know if anyone else has though, since I also have particular interests in this area.

Cheers,

Timkin

This book covers cooperative pathfinding, and it also has some tips on preprocessing AI. I'm thinking of buying it, haven't read it yet, but a friend indicated it for me, so I'm forwarding his advice ;)

Son Of Cain

I don't actually know of any books directly covering these problems. At work it seems to be more the domain of institutional knowledge. I'll do a walk-around and see what I can come up with.

-me

Literature pickings are indeed meager; so far just got this link:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~silver/research/publications/files/CoopPath05.pdf

He does of course reference other papers in his publications so maybe it's enough to create a nice branching search for the info you need.

-me

Yep, Silver's my new hero. I've been hanging on his every published word for the last day or so.

I just talked to Dr. Richard Korf... he pointed me at Silver, but wasn't aware of any books which covered cooperative pathfinding.

Thanks for the link Paladine... I'm not surprised to see it come from UoAlberta... 8)

University of Alberta have an excellent game AI group. I based my BSc project on a lot of their work :)
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/