A* Search: How Your Map Applications Find Shortest Routes

To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit Chapters: 0:00 Introduction and Graph Representation 1:37 Greedy Approach 4:12 Uniform Cost Search (UCS) 7:13 Greedy vs UCS 8:52 A* Search 11:09 Optimality of A* Search 14:45 Sponsorship In this video, we explore the algorithms behind how modern mapping applications find routes that optimize time, distance, and cost. We motivate A* search from a first principle approach, building up to showing how it is a harmonious combination of both a careful, rigorous approach and a greedy, opportunistic approach. Animations created jointly by Nipun Ramakrishnan and Jesús Rascón This video wouldn’t be possible without the open source library manim created by 3blue1brown and maintained by Manim Community. The Manim Community Developers. (2024). Manim – Mathematical Animation Framework (Version ) [Computer software]. Here is link to the repository that contains the code used to generate the animations in this video: Music in this video comes from Jesús Rascón Socials: Special Thanks to the Following Patreons: Brian Cloutier George Sharabidze kerrytazi Maggie Nguyen Adam Dřínek Andreas justin Matt Q Ram Kanhirotentavida Rocky Winston Durand Asha Ramakrishnan Eugene Tulushev Michael Nawenstein Richard Wells Zac Landis Zac LandisZac Landis