Lab — Games & algorithms
Maze Lab is a free online tool that generates a perfect maze and animates the A* search algorithm solving it — watch the frontier flood the maze, dead ends get pruned, and the shortest path snap into view, all in your browser.
Controls
Maze
Results
A* scores every candidate cell as f = g + h: g is the steps already taken from the start, h is the Manhattan distance (up/down/left/right steps, ignoring walls) to the goal. At each step it expands the lowest-f cell on the frontier. Because h never overestimates the true remaining distance, the first time A* reaches the goal it has found a shortest path — everything else it visited was the price of proving it.