title: Chasing after a moving target?
body: <p>Suppose that you have a world with two players in it the <strong>chaser</strong> and the <strong>target</strong>.  Suppose that the chaser moves slightly faster than the target.  If you are the chaser and you know for a fact that the target is intelligent and trying not to get caught, what would be a good approach for chasing down and ultimately catching the target?  (I'm leaving the details of the world a big vague, since I'm hoping to learn a general algorithm or family of techniques for solving this problem rather than optimizing too much on the structure of the world.)</p>
  
  <p>Initially I figured that using something like Dijkstra's algorithm or A* and constantly recomputing the route as the target moved would be a good idea, but there may actually be a better solution that works by taking a more roundabout route so as to corner the target.  This could also be modeled as a two-player game that could be solved with minimax or UCT, but the search space could be so huge that it would be completely infeasible to do any reasonable searches.</p>
  
  <p>Has this problem been extensively studied?  If so, is there a set of well-known techniques that could be used here?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <p><em>(My apologies if this is a duplicate; I couldn't seem to find another question like this one, but if there is one I'd be happy to close this one).</em></p>