Empirical evaluation of ad hoc teamwork in the pursuit domain

The concept of creating autonomous agents capable of exhibiting ad hoc teamwork was recently introduced as a challenge to the Al, and specifically to the multiagent systems community. An agent ca-pable of ad hoc teamwork is one that can effectively cooperate with multiple potential teammates on a set of collaborative tasks. Previous research has investigated theoretically optimal ad hoc teamwork strategies in restrictive settings. This paper presents the first empirical study of ad hoc teamwork in a more open, complex teamwork domain. Specifically, we evaluate a range of effective algorithms for on-line behavior generation on the part of a single ad hoc team agent that must collaborate with a range of possible teammates in the pursuit domain.