Edging

Running along the edges of the screen is a strategy that easily creates confusion in humans. A human player approaching the edge often finds it difficult to quickly look at the other edge to plan ahead for what is going after emerging on the other side. A wall along it is difficult to see. Agents on the other hand, are immune to this strategy -- the border of the screen is invisible to them; their sensors have no perception of borders, they don't really exist, being an artifact of how the display was encoded for visual human input (fig. 3.35).

  

Figure 3.35: Edging and Staircasing. Here R. 5210008 shows the use of staircasing to produce a diagonal displacement in a domain where only horizontal and vertical movements were originally defined. Creating walls along the edges of the screen, as in this game, allows Tron agents to exploit one human handicap: humans have trouble understanding the toroidal topology where edges are connected. In this game the human attempted to go across the border and crashed the wall that the agent had built (black=agent, gray=human).