This Red Blob Games blog post would be accessible to a wider group of readers if it spent just a few sentences up front on motivation and terminology.
If you don't already know exactly what the heuristic function is and that L is something called a landmark marker, and anyway what is a landmark marker anyway, you need to read quite a long way through the blog post to make sense of it.
And when you do finally get to that point, you realise it is all very simple, so why not just say that at the start?
You’re asking for a different post. More like a science paper where they say the result up front.
This blog post is like a story. It doesn’t start with the ending.
I read your comment first, expecting to go to the article and see a bunch of undefined math terms, but that isn’t what happened at all.
Of course you need to know what a heuristic function is, so maybe you’re right in that sense. You absolutely do not need to know anything about landmarks to enjoy the post. I didn’t, and it was no trouble at all to follow.
Perhaps you found the “discovery” method of presentation not to your liking. Discovery means there’s a demo where you move the L around before its purpose is defined. Building an intuitive understanding before producing a rigorous definition is (now) considered a good teaching method.
Comments
This Red Blob Games blog post would be accessible to a wider group of readers if it spent just a few sentences up front on motivation and terminology.
If you don't already know exactly what the heuristic function is and that L is something called a landmark marker, and anyway what is a landmark marker anyway, you need to read quite a long way through the blog post to make sense of it.
And when you do finally get to that point, you realise it is all very simple, so why not just say that at the start?
You’re asking for a different post. More like a science paper where they say the result up front.
This blog post is like a story. It doesn’t start with the ending.
I read your comment first, expecting to go to the article and see a bunch of undefined math terms, but that isn’t what happened at all.
Of course you need to know what a heuristic function is, so maybe you’re right in that sense. You absolutely do not need to know anything about landmarks to enjoy the post. I didn’t, and it was no trouble at all to follow.
Perhaps you found the “discovery” method of presentation not to your liking. Discovery means there’s a demo where you move the L around before its purpose is defined. Building an intuitive understanding before producing a rigorous definition is (now) considered a good teaching method.
Before reading about optimizing the A* algorithm, read about the algorithm itself first.