self-symmetric

A few years ago, I wondered whether it was possible to extend A* to pathfinding with momentum. It would require a consistent and admissible heuristic for Newtonian kinematics. It was a little tricky to find but it turns out that it does exist!

The code (and animations) are here: https://github.com/matthew-piziak/spacepath

It shows a spaceship finding time-optimal paths around asteroids, with nothing but A* doing the pathing.

Among other things, I'm:

- writing a game from the perspective of an AI being born

- participating in an Effective Altruism fellowship

- learning molecular biology (cells are incredible!)

- experimenting with JAX on Google's TPU Research Cloud