Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Latest Posts

Top shortest races: Perfect for beginners and experienced runners

Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I tackled this little challenge I called “shortest races”. It’s not as grand as it sounds, promise!

Top shortest races: Perfect for beginners and experienced runners

The Idea

Basically, the idea popped into my head when I was messing around with some pathfinding stuff. I thought, “Hey, what if I wanted to find the shortest possible race track between a bunch of checkpoints?”. Kinda silly, I know, but it sounded like a fun problem to solve.

First Steps: Grabbing the Right Tools

  • I knew I needed something to represent the map. So, I started with a simple 2D grid. Nothing fancy, just rows and columns.
  • Then, I needed a way to find the shortest path between two points. A algorithm seemed like the go-to for this kind of thing, so I grabbed an A implementation I’d used before and dusted it off.

Building the Track

Here’s where it got a little interesting. I wanted to make sure the “race track” visited all the checkpoints in the shortest possible order.

Top shortest races: Perfect for beginners and experienced runners
  1. Generating Checkpoints: I randomly scattered a bunch of checkpoints across the grid. Just used a random number generator to get the coordinates.
  2. Finding All Permutations: This is the brute-force part. I generated all possible orders in which you could visit the checkpoints. Yeah, for a large number of checkpoints, this gets slow real fast. But I was just experimenting, so I didn’t worry too much about efficiency at this stage.
  3. Calculating Path Lengths: For each possible order of checkpoints, I used the A algorithm to find the shortest path between each pair of consecutive checkpoints in that order. Then, I added up all those path lengths to get the total “race track” length for that particular order.
  4. Finding the Shortest: After calculating the track length for every possible order, I just picked the one with the shortest length. Bam! Shortest race track (at least, according to my program).

The Code (Simplified):

I won’t bore you with all the nitty-gritty details, but here’s a super-simplified version of what the core loop looked like:


// checkpoints is a list of (x, y) coordinates

// get all possible orderings of checkpoints

List<List<Point>> permutations = GetPermutations(checkpoints);

Top shortest races: Perfect for beginners and experienced runners

double shortestDistance = *;

List<Point> shortestPath = null;

foreach (List<Point> permutation in permutations) {

double currentDistance = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < * - 1; i++) {

Top shortest races: Perfect for beginners and experienced runners

// AStarSearch is my A pathfinding function

List<Point> path = AStarSearch(permutation[i], permutation[i+1]);

currentDistance += CalculatePathLength(path);

if (currentDistance < shortestDistance) {

shortestDistance = currentDistance;

Top shortest races: Perfect for beginners and experienced runners

shortestPath = permutation;

// shortestPath now contains the order of checkpoints that produces the shortest race track

The Result

It actually worked! The program would generate a grid, some random checkpoints, and then figure out the shortest route that visited all the checkpoints. It was pretty cool to see it in action.

What I Learned

Top shortest races: Perfect for beginners and experienced runners
  • A is Your Friend: Seriously, for pathfinding, A is a lifesaver.
  • Brute Force Has Limits: While brute-forcing all the permutations worked for a small number of checkpoints, it’s definitely not scalable. I need to look into some more efficient algorithms for larger problems (maybe something using dynamic programming or genetic algorithms).
  • Visualizing is Key: I spent a bunch of time just printing text output to the console. Once I hooked it up to a simple visualizer, it was way easier to debug and understand what was going on.

Next Steps?

I’m thinking of trying to optimize this a bit. Maybe implement a better algorithm for finding the optimal checkpoint order. Also, it would be fun to add obstacles to the grid and see how that affects the shortest race track.

Anyway, that’s my “shortest races” experiment. It was a fun little project, and I learned a few things along the way. Hope you found it interesting!

Latest Posts

Don't Miss