ABSTRACT
Utility-based approaches to decision making examine the situation in the game at the moment a decision is being made, calculate the goodness (which is often called things like utility, priority, weight, or score) of each option using a heuristic function, and then drive decision making using that value. This can be contrasted against purely Boolean decisionmaking approaches, such as the typical finite state machine (FSM) or behavior tree, which evaluate a series of black-or-white, yes-or-no questions in order to select an option for execution.
