Deception by Motion: The Eater and the Mover Game.

We study the idea of "deception by motion" through a two-player dynamic game played between a Mover who must reach its goal to retrieve resources, and an Eater who can consume resources from two candidate goals. The Mover seeks to minimize the resource consumption at the true goal it must reach, while the Eater tries to maximize it without knowing which one the true goal is. Unlike existing works on deceptive motion control that measures the deceptiveness through the quality of inference made by a distant observer (an estimator), we incorporate the observing agent's actions to directly measure the efficacy of deception through the outcome of the game. We identify a pair of equilibrium strategies and demonstrate that if the observing agent optimizes for the worst-case scenario, hiding the intention (deception by ambiguity) is effective, whereas trying to fake the true goal (deception by exaggeration) is not.