// the find
clementmihailescu/Pathfinding-Visualizer
A visualization tool for various pathfinding algorithms.
A browser-based visualizer for pathfinding algorithms — Dijkstra, A*, BFS, DFS, and a few variants — with a grid you can draw walls on and watch the algorithm run step by step. Built as a learning project and it shows: the code is plain vanilla JS bundled into a single file, no framework, no tests. Aimed at CS students and anyone who wants to see why DFS is terrible for mazes.
The visual feedback is genuinely good — you can see the explored nodes fan out in real time, which makes the difference between Dijkstra and A* immediately obvious in a way that no textbook diagram matches. Recursive Division maze generation is a nice touch that gives you non-trivial test cases instantly. The 'bomb node' mechanic (find bomb first, then target) adds a two-phase pathfinding demo that most similar tools skip. Supports weighted nodes, so you can show why unweighted BFS doesn't cut it when terrain costs vary.
The repo is essentially a student project frozen in 2020 and last touched in 2023 to fix a dependency; there's no active maintenance and no tests of any kind. Everything lives in a pre-built bundle.js — you can't actually modify an algorithm and see it run without figuring out the build setup yourself. The 'Swarm Algorithm' is presented as an original invention but it's just a weighted A* variant with a tuned heuristic; calling it a co-developed algorithm is a stretch. Chrome-only warning in the README and the CSS-primary language tag suggest the project was never really cleaned up after the initial launch.