Freesteel Blog » A minor A* improvement

A minor A* improvement

Friday, January 10th, 2014 at 4:22 pm Written by:

The stay-down linking code relies on an implementation of the A* search algorithm to quickly find a connecting path between the start point and end point by spreading a network of paths in an optimal way.

There’s a couple of nice animations from Wikipedia showing what they look like.

Dijksta’s A*

Suppose we have a network of paths, like so:

The path from Start to A and the path from Start to B rank the same in the priority queue because:

length(Start, B) + distance(B, End) < length(Start, A) + distance(A, End)

(The length function is the length of the green path, while the distance function is the length of the yellow path.)

According to the A* algorithm, the next step should extend outwards from the point B before we go from A on the basis that there could potentially be a direct path that takes us all the way from B to the End point that is shorter than the best one we are going to get by extending A.

But this is impossible, because the theoretical best direct path cuts through many paths (including the Start to A one) before it reaches End, and any one of these paths could be substituted up to the point of intersection into that StartBEnd path to make it shorter, which is illogical, captain.

Therefore, if there is going to be a shorter path from Start that passes through B, then it will have avoid at the very least the girth of the search tree, defined as a line connected two extreme points, like so:

And when you use this to increase the value of distance(B, End) in the formula above to the length of the two segments required to get round the girth line on either side (whichever is shorter), you don’t get quite so much unnecessary sprawl near the Start point. You can add more girth lines if you like.

It’s a small improvement, but practically for free, and may make a big difference for a lot of realistic cases where there is one major obstruction.

1 Comment

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>