A* (A Star) Live Demo

Context

This is a live demonstration of the A* pathfinding algorithm implemented in Elixir using LiveView. The implementation itself is a functional step-by-step version of the famous A* algorithm, which is most commonly used in video games.

I hacked the original version of this demo over a weekend in Feb 2021, ingesting a lot of content about pathing, and a bit about LiveView, in order to showcase it during an internal talk at Pandascore. I got back to it and refactored the whole thing later to clean it up.

Please keep in mind that this is, however, not a perfect example of algorithmic efficiency (there's a lot of linear search through lists and it could probably be better), and that there might be mistakes or imprecisions about my implementation.

What is A*?

Demo

Head over to Fly.io.

You control the robot. Pick a target, find the path, and walk the path.

Repo

Source code is available on Github.