"Open Labyrinth" Review
Hi, CiO friends!
Today, let's try to find a path between two points in the maze. We will take a closer look at the "Open Labyrinth" mission. In this mission you are given the map of a maze, and your task is to find a path from one corner to another. The maze can be represented as a graph where empty cells are nodes and adjacent cells are connected. Because we don't need find the shortest path, we can use various graph-traversal algorithms. So let's see what algorithms the CheckiO community came up with.
"So, the Labyrinth is a piece of cake, is it? Well, let's see how you deal with this little slice..."
Breadth-first_search and Depth-first_search are similar to each other. DFS visits the child nodes before visiting the sibling nodes; that is, it traverses the depth of any particular path before exploring its breadth. BFS visits the parent nodes before visiting the child nodes. A stack is used for DFS and a queue for BFS. So you can easily "switch" DFS to BFS.
@spoty's solution "BFS + deque" is a classical BFS realisation, using a double ended queue. It's faster than using a list and also we can easily switch BFS to DFS by simply replacing "q.popleft()" => "q.popright()".
from collections import deque def checkio(maze_map, start=(1, 1), goal=(10, 10)): def get_adjacent(n): x, y = n n = [(x - 1, y, "N"), (x, y - 1, "W"), (x + 1, y, "S"), (x, y + 1, "E")] return [((x, y), c) for x, y, c in n if maze_map[x][y] != 1] q, v = deque([(start, "")]), set() while q: cords, path = q.popleft() if cords == goal: return path + mark if cords in v: continue v.add(cords) for pos, mark in get_adjacent(cords): if pos in v: continue else: q.append((pos, path + mark))
Sarah: "You don't by any chance know the way through this labyrinth, do you?"
The Worm: "Who, me? No, I'm just a worm. Say, come inside, and meet the missus"
A* search algorithm
As A* traverses the graph, it follows a path of the lowest expected total cost or distance, keeping a sorted priority queue of alternate path segments along the way. You can read more on Wikipedia.
""" Navigate a maze and return a route from the start to the finish. Use A* to find a path in an efficient manner. """ import heapq import collections # The cardinal directions DIRECTIONS = [ (0, -1, 'N'), (0, 1, 'S'), (-1, 0, 'W'), (1, 0, 'E'), ] Node = collections.namedtuple('Node', ['hist', 'ix', 'dist', 'pt', 'prev', 'direction']) def heuristic(point, goal): """ Return an admissible heuristic for the distance from point to goal. For the case of a grid with orthogonal movement, use the Manhattan distance. """ return abs(point - goal) + abs(point - goal) def checkio(labyrinth): """ Return a string of the characters [NSEW] describing a path through labyrinth. labyrinth: A list of lists. '0' indicates a passable cell. """ height, width = len(labyrinth), len(labyrinth) start = (1, 1) goal = (height - 2, width - 2) # Each node consists of (estimated path distance, ix, dist, (x, y), previous node, direction) # The ix field is a serial number to ensure that subsequent fields are # not compared. open = [Node(heuristic(start, goal), 0, 0, start, None, None)] # A set of all visited coordinates. explored = set() ix = 1 while open: node = heapq.heappop(open) _, _, dist, point, prev, prev_d = node if point in explored: continue if point == goal: break explored.add(point) # Now consider moves in each direction. for dx, dy, d in DIRECTIONS: new_point = point + dx, point + dy if new_point not in explored and \ not labyrinth[new_point][new_point]: h = dist + 1 + heuristic(new_point, goal) tie_break = 4 if prev_d != d else 0 # Prefer moving straight new_node = Node(h, ix + tie_break, dist + 1, new_point, node, d) heapq.heappush(open, new_node) ix = ix + 1 # Return a path to node result = '' while node.prev is not None: result = node.direction + result node = node.prev return result
Sarah: That's not fair!
Jareth: You say that so often, I wonder what your basis for comparison is?
Dijkstra, Lee and others
BFS and A* are the most used algorithms, but there are many others.
"Tell me Sarah, what do you think of my labyrinth?"
That's all folks!
Valentin Bryukhanov aka Bryukh
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