This short tutorial will walk you through the features of this application

• At its core, a pathfinding algorithm seeks to find the shortest path between two points. This application visualizes various pathfinding algorithms in action.

• All of the algorithms on this application are modeled on a 2D grid where movement from one node to another has a "cost" of one unit.

• Meet the pathfinding algorithms

  • Dijkstra's algorithm : The father of all pathfinding algorithms - weighted and guarantees the shortest path

  • Depth First search : A very bad algorithm for pathfinding , unweighted and does not guarantee the shortest path.

  • Breadth First search : Pretty good at finding the shortest path in unweighted type

  • A* search : Uses heuristics to determine the shortest path, one of the best algorithms out there.

• Start node is marked with blue color.

• End node is marked with red color.

• Click on the grid to add walls. (black color)

• Walls are impenetrable, meaning that a path cannot cross through them.

• The shortest path (if it exists) is marked by yellow color.

I hope you have just as much fun playing around with this visualization tool as I had building it!