Interactive Demo

This demo is instructive of the various search algorithms we will cover here. You can introduce using your mouse obstacles in the canvas and see how the various search methods behave.

astar-demo

\(A^*\) algorithm demo . If the demo is not shown below, click on the link above. Define the gray wall and run all the search algorithms.

We can clearly see the substantial difference in search speed and the beamforming-effect as soon as the wave (frontier) evaluates nodes where the heuristic (the Manhattan distance from the goal node) becomes dominant. Notice the difference between A* and the UCS / Dijkstra’s algorithm in the number of nodes that needed to be evaluated.