In games we often want to find paths from one location to another. A* is a commonly recommended algorithm. Breadth First Search, Dijkstra’s Algorithm, and A* are graph search algorithms that use the same basic structure. They represent the map as a graph and then find a path in that graph. If you haven’t seen node-and-edge graphs before, here’s my introductory article. Breadth First Search is the simplest of the graph search algorithms, so let’s start there, and we’ll work our way up to A*.
Introduction to A*
