PathFinder is an open-source application which I (Matthew Egan) have developed for the sole purpose of curiosity. The application is powered by Kivy, a Python GUI framework. The PathFinder Agent implements the A* search algorithm which, using a heuristic, will find the optimal path through some state space (in our case, a maze of 2 dimensional co-ordinates) from some starting state to a goal state.

The heuristic I have decided to use by default is the diagonal distance heuristic which will estimate the minimum amount of steps to the goal when allowed 8 directions of movement.

To run PathFinder, simply clone the repository:

clone https://github.com/mattjegan/PathFinder

Install Kivy, and then run:

kivy PathFinder.py

If you would like to contribute to PathFinder please make a pull request.

To customize PathFinder colours and value permanently, simply edit values in Settings.py.

It is possible to customize PathFinder from the command line. This is primarily for the case when a user wants to run multiple simulations of the PathFinder Agent with different constraints. Due to Kivy already parsing command line arguments we must interact with PathFinder through piped arguments:

echo '5 2000 300 50' | kivy PathFinder.py

The string is of the form CELL_SIZE NUM_OBSTACLES GRID_WIDTH GRID_HEIGHT