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DevonCrawford/A-Pathfinding-Visualization

★ 299 · Java · MIT · updated Sep 2021

First attempt at an efficient pathfinding algorithm in Java. I made this visualization to show the beauty of pathfinding. You can modify all major features of my algorithm through the graphics interface.

A* pathfinding visualizer built in Java as a learning project. You draw walls on a grid, set start/end nodes, and watch the algorithm explore paths in real time. Aimed at students learning graph search algorithms.

The diagonal movement toggle is a nice teaching aid — watching the heuristic change behavior is genuinely illustrative. Decoupling the step-by-step visualization from the timing mode lets you see both the algorithm's behavior and its raw performance. The GIFs in the README do a better job explaining the controls than most text docs would.

Stack overflow is a documented, unresolved bug — the README literally warns you not to make the map too large. It's a single Java file for the algorithm with no tests, so there's no way to verify correctness on edge cases. Last touched in 2021 with no activity since. The zoom feature is admitted to be broken and was never fixed.

View on GitHub → Homepage ↗

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