Algorithms for detecting the structure of labyrinths and studying the efficiency of their application

Abstract

The article considers labyrinths in the context of the task of their creation and completion for use in the gaming IT industry. Artificial intelligence is currently used to simulate human behavior in computer games, which, depending on the algorithms, more or less imitates the intelligent behavior of a computer opponent. The peculiarity of a computer player is that at the software level, computer opponents have access to all objects of the game situation: the level map, the game board, etc. For a better human imitation of the behavior of the agent, the data coming to it is suppressed in such a way that it coincides with the data that a person in the same situation can receive using the senses. Therefore, it is important to apply appropriate algorithms for finding a way out of it, as well as recognizing their structure. The study of path-finding algorithms and the structure of the labyrinth for the detection of "human-like" approaches, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of such algorithms, allows us to identify better algorithms on the basis of which it is possible to develop games with a more interesting plot. Thus, this work is devoted to the research of algorithms for finding the structure of a labyrinth. Achieving the final goal involves the practical development of software in the Java language for visualizing their structure and obtaining specific values of the performance parameters of the selected algorithms. The work provides basic information about labyrinths, their main varieties and structures, and provides a mathematical model of an ideal labyrinth. Questions related to the selection of parameters for evaluating the effectiveness of their work, the direct analysis of algorithms, the design of a test application in Java and the analysis of the obtained results are investigated and resolved. During the performance evaluation, several structure research algorithms were analyzed in terms of speed of operation, and recommendations were given to choose the most optimal of the ones presented.