I’ve been playing with A* in the past. A* is an algorithm widely used for pathfinding in games or for graph traversal in an economical way.
Recently I’ve found a cool JavaScript implementation of different pathfinding algorithms, including A*.
Also, I ended up finding a blog about Jump Point Search that speeds the search considerably by D. Harabor. This is very interesting as it considerers pruning rules to avoid visiting certain nodes that would be visited optimally from the current node’s parent without passing through the current node.
According to the author’s the JPS (Jump Point Search) can consistently speed up A* by over 10 times. That’s impressive. The images on the blog post about the search are a great illustration of the results achieved.