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I like the A* pathfinding algorithm. It's not particularly elegant or beautiful on itself, and it's very dependant on the heuristics applied & the topology of the terrain used. Yet the results tend to be quite pleasing to watch.

Also, it has a great website dedicated to it, with lots of interactive demos:

http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/



Actually it's pretty elegant by itself, Consider this all traversals are same,

val someDS;

while(!someDS.isEmpty()){

  addChildren(someDS.pop())
}

Now replace, someDs with

Queue -> BFS

Stack -> DFS

Priority Queue, with priority of distance so far -> Dijkstra.

Priority Queue, with distance + heuristic -> A*

Its beautiful.


The development of "Shakey the robot" led to the discovery of A* along with a few other algorithms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey_the_robot




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