   Why are so many things in Comp.Sci. Named so we can't search for them on computers?
  So, I'm picking away at stuff for an algorithm's class, and started looking around for different methods of searching graphs. Apparently I'm rather tired now. I base this on how long it took me to clue into why searching for A* in google is so highly futile.Anyone have any ideas (serious ones are not pre-req for posting here) about why some of us in Computer Science can miss such an issue so easily when titling a paper for our new and cool development?   
  Perhaps it's a test by Google. They want to see who can actually find stuff about computing science because you have to KNOW stuff about computing science beforehand to find it, and if you know stuff about computing science you're eligible for a job...   ;  Your google skills need tweaking.A star tutorialhttp://www.google.com/search?q=A+star+tutorial&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a;  I've been wondering this myself.  "Light cookies" is another example of this.   ;  It's because Computer Scientists (i.e. people with a degree that says "computer" and "science" in some order, with or without other adjectives, nouns, and adjective nouns) have huge egos and love to give things descriptively non-descriptive titles that don't make sense, in an effort to make their research sound really advanced.   ;  It could have been worse - they could have stuck with their original algorithm name - "A".   ;  Yeah, there is a counterpart to Z buffers called A buffers I think. Although searching for "A buffer" works...   ;  umm, searching for a* works just fine for me.clickie;A pathfindingresulted in a three relevant pages. A* tutorial, Amid page, and devmaster.What was your problem? BTW game developers are not searching graphs, game developers are working with a nice large detailed land full of colors, grass, trees, and hills.  Land like that cant be made into graph without insane computational difficulty *1, or weird glitches. So A* is left for mental masturbation, or that few case where it might work, if there will not be better algorithms.*1 It's not only one time overhead, it has overhead everytime when it should be used, when computing delta.   ;Quote:Original post by Raghargame developers are not searching graphs, game developers are working with a nice large detailed land full of colors, grass, trees, and hills. There is no grass, tree, or hill inside your computer, and the colors exit only on your monitor. Game developers are working with a computer-friendly internal representation of that stuff, which includes visibility or navigation graphs. Quote:Land like that cant be made into graph without insane computational difficulty *1, or weird glitches.Which is why everyone uses the reverse operation of transforming computer-friendly data into grass, trees and hills, instead of transforming grass, trees and hills into computer-friendly data.