As you may already know if you follow me on Twitter (why not?), I often work with pathfinding. This thing started as a small side quest during my Ph.D. and then grew up to become the main topic of my future Ph.D. thesis. I’m still quite sure that this is not what I chose back in the day but, well, now that I’m on the dancefloor I have to keep dancing.

Returning to the subject, my work is totally focused on pathfinding with cognitive capabilities. This means that I try to embed pathfinding into a more high-level reasoning pattern or, if you prefer, to push high level elements - such as reasoning with keys and equipment - down into the pathfinding level. As a consequence I use hierarchical abstraction of the map space a lot and for “a lot” I mean that in the last year and half I’ve implemented Hierarchical Pathfinding (HPA*) at least 4-5 times in different context and languages.