okay, so i have a program with an arbitrary number of nodes. each nodes is connected to an arbitrary number of nodes. how can i find the shortest path between two nodes efficiently?

also, im thinking of gpgpu to speed this up, what do you guys think?

Are there nodes that have access to other modes that some don’t? Is there some kind of metric to decide whether or not a path is more efficient than the other (latency)?

Not 100% sure what you mean by node, not really my area of development. But maybe you could somehow adapt the A* pathfinding algorithm ?

Depth First Search (Kappa)

@Andrian was about to say this too.

@host127001 I thought it was Breadth First Search for finding Shortest path? I could be wrong....

Assign a weight of 1 to each edge. And then use BFS. If edges have different weights, like node A to B takes longer than node A to C plus C to B, then you'd need dijkstra.
Look them up on Youtube and there should be plemty of examples on github. This is all assuming there are no negative weighted edges.

@billgates it is. My comment wasn't serious

As @Andrian said, it seems a perfect case for Dijkstra's algorithm.

Sinatra would solve this, but A* (a-star) is a bit more efficient. It's also possible to improve it with parallel computing

@cachoputa doesn't A* require a direction?

@cachoputa OH FUCK I meant "Dijkstra" and not "Sinatra" wtf

And @Wack, it needs to know where the start and end nodes are in space (the coordinates) so it can know the distance

@cachoputa since that information isn't (nessesary) provided, I'd go with a BFS here