Explore Simple Game Algorithms with Color Walk: Part 10

We're back for another round of exploring game algorithms using the simple game Color Walk. We finally reached the point of evaluating Dijkstra's algorithm—the classic, efficient graph algorithm for finding shortest paths—in the last post. It performed pretty well against the top dogs: Greedy Look-Ahead (GLA) and the GLA-BFS hybrid, especially when it came to consistently finding the best moves. However, it failed to find the best moves when a board could be solved in under 29 moves, so we're going to see if we can squeeze out any more performance by modifying Dijkstra's algorithm further. To do that, we're going to try combining Dijkstra's algorithm with GLA, running Dijkstra's algorithm in more than one pass, and changing the heuristic we use to guide the search.

Explore Simple Game Algorithms with Color Walk: Part 9

Welcome back for more exploration of game algorithms using the simple game Color Walk. In the last post we covered the other fundamental graph search algorithm, depth-first search (DFS), the counterpart to the previously discussed breadth-first search (BFS). These graph algorithms do a full search of the graph of a color walk game, the full set of board positions resulting from each move at each point in the game. We found that running either of these algorithms to completion is extremely prohibitive due to the graph size being exponential in the number of moves. In order to deal with that exponential growth, we need to look at other graph algorithms, and we have quite a few to choose from. We'll explore some categories of graph algorithms and look at one in more detail, Dijkstra's algorithm.