Electronics Project:A star Algorithm

Implementation of A star (A*) algorithm in Matlab:

This project provides the implementations of A star (A*) algorithm in Matlab.

In computer science, A* is a computer algorithm that is widely used in path finding and graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path between points, called nodes. Noted for its performance and accuracy, it enjoys widespread use. A* uses a best-first search and finds a least-cost path from a given initial node to one goal node (out of one or more possible goals). As A* traverses the graph, it follows a path of the lowest expected total cost or distance, keeping a sorted priority queue of alternate path segments along the way.

A-Star (or A*) is a general search algorithm that is extremely competitive with other search algorithms, and yet intuitively easy to understand. Search algorithms are used in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from Artificial Intelligence planning problems to English sentence parsing. Because of this, an effective search algorithm allows us to solve a large number of problems with greater ease. The problems that A-Star is best used for are those that can be represented as a state space. Given a suitable problem, you represent the initial conditions of the problem with an appropriate initial state, and the goal conditions as the goal state. For each action that you can perform, generate successor states to represent the effects of the action. If you keep doing this and at some point one of the generated successor states is the goal state, then the path from the initial state to the goal state is the solution to your problem. What A-Star does is generate and process the successor states in a certain way. Whenever it is looking for the next state to process, A-Star employs a heuristic function to try to pick the best state to process next. If the heuristic function is good, not only will A-Star find a solution quickly, but it can also find the best solution possible.