Anyone who's interested in this might want to check out the OSRM project, which uses a much more complex routing algorithm to efficiently find paths through the <i>entire</i> OSM graph, instead of just a tiny subset: <a href="http://map.project-osrm.org/" rel="nofollow">http://map.project-osrm.org/</a><p>(Also, it's open-source.)
Related: A few friends and I built a similar visualization for pathfinding algorithms with OSM data for an AI class:<p><a href="http://www.kevanahlquist.com/osm_pathfinding/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kevanahlquist.com/osm_pathfinding/</a><p>It shows how nodes are explored on the map with different search algorithms and the optimal path once the search is completed.
Have you tried this with A* and seen any performance differences? This is very fast in the browser with a small map, but I imagine with a much larger map the difference would be noticeable.
Bug report: if I open this in a background tab the map is zoomed in very close at a weird spot near the middle and it's confusing what is being demonstrated.
Small discussion of a previous routing algorithm implemented in a similar way:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187275" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187275</a>
Nice work. I think we are doing somethings correlated.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12647348" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12647348</a>