PathFinder

The UI now looks nice and polished and more visually appealing. Added a new worldwide feature which I felt was really necessary since I wanted the user to pick any location they wanted. Also added a way for the person to learn how the algorithm actually works. Overall, this was a really huge update and I’m super proud of how this turned out. Hope you enjoy seeing these things work and find it just as beautiful as I did. Thank you for following along!! :) ^^

Added support for more cities like Tokyo and Berlin, but I still keep running into.a bug where it chooses a completely different path that hasn’t been explored and isn’t the shortest path. The visuals still look good maybe there’s something wrong with the logic. I still need to work on the website’s UI, having trouble getting it to work perfectly. Steady progess is still good I guess. Hope you enjoy it :))

So, the algorithms are working correctly. The only issue right now is getting them to work on any place in the world. I keep hitting the rate limit for OpenStreetMapRouting, which I need to make a gird out of the map. It’s a little slow, and sometimes straight up doesn’t work. I’m thinking of a workaround wherein I download the maps of major cities as a grid and just load them in. This would make everything significantly faster, and as an experiment feature maybe I can also include short distances but placed anywhere in the world with less dense roads. Altogether though, this is coming along really well. Hope yall like it :))

Got OpenStreetMaps to work, alongside the OverPass API. So the OverPass API gets all the available road routes. And the algorithm (BFS for now) explores all the possible roads one by one, in a queue and finds the shortest path between two points. Often times, if large distances are entered, it glitches out and the API doesn’t work since it is all free but on small distances like 30-40 kilometers, it should work fine. I need to add more path finding algorithms and make the UI look nicer but overall, everything is coming along quite well :)

Implemented both Informed and Uninformed Search Algorithms, Breadth First Search, Depth First Search, Greedy Best First Search, and the A* Algorithm. Getting them to work on an actual map is going to be the difficult part but, right now just focusing on getting a conceptual understanding of all of them. In the attached video, I’ve implemented the A* algorithm. Let’s see hope, I get to scale up this project to include maps and everything. Also I need to implement Dijkstra’s algorithm but I’m still working on understanding that one. Thank you for following along :))

Working on getting a simple python version up and running so I get a hang of how path finding algorithms actually work, later on I plan on implenting all this using OpenStreetMaps and with an actual web interface with real maps, but for now just working on the logic of how each algorithm will work and focusing on gaining a deeper understanding of them :)