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Robot in a wooden maze. A maze-solving algorithm is an automated method for solving a maze.The random mouse, wall follower, Pledge, and Trémaux's algorithms are designed to be used inside the maze by a traveler with no prior knowledge of the maze, whereas the dead-end filling and shortest path algorithms are designed to be used by a person or computer program that can see the whole maze at once.
A maze is a path or collection of paths, typically from an entrance to a goal. The word is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching ("unicursal") patterns that lead unambiguously through a convoluted layout to a goal.
The animation shows the maze generation steps for a graph that is not on a rectangular grid. First, the computer creates a random planar graph G shown in blue, and its dual F shown in yellow. Second, the computer traverses F using a chosen algorithm, such as a depth-first search, coloring the path red.
If the maze is on paper, the thread may well be a pencil. Logic problems of all natures may be resolved via Ariadne's thread, the maze being but an example. At present, it is most prominently applied to Sudoku puzzles, used to attempt values for as-yet-unsolved cells. The medium of the thread for puzzle-solving can vary widely, from a pencil to ...
The A* algorithm has real-world applications. In this example, edges are railroads and h(x) is the great-circle distance (the shortest possible distance on a sphere) to the target. The algorithm is searching for a path between Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
The problem for graphs is NP-complete if the edge lengths are assumed integers. The problem for points on the plane is NP-complete with the discretized Euclidean metric and rectilinear metric. The problem is known to be NP-hard with the (non-discretized) Euclidean metric. [3]: ND22, ND23
Two primary problems of pathfinding are (1) to find a path between two nodes in a graph; and (2) the shortest path problem—to find the optimal shortest path. Basic algorithms such as breadth-first and depth-first search address the first problem by exhausting all possibilities; starting from the given node, they iterate over all potential ...
Shortest path (A, C, E, D, F), blue, between vertices A and F in the weighted directed graph. In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices (or nodes) in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized.