pathfinding

Pathfinding is used in games to construct how AIs (and/or non-player characters) navigate the environment. At it’s core it is to emulate wayfinding. When working on a board game it’s easy to see and modify how characters and whatnot move around the board. In video games it can be hard to figure out exactly why a character is moving in a particular way.

For non-programemrs understanding the algorithms at work behind the scenes can be difficult. At GitHub there is a PathFinding visualization project which allows you to play with different algorithms.