3blue1brownHow to relocate a stranded whale before it explodes (using algorithms)
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Tags: computer-sciencegeometryalgorithmpathfindingconfiguration-spaceroboticscollision-detection
Let’s say a whale magically dropped into a city out of nowhere. What logistical challenges would we have to overcome to move it out of there? This video explains how we can solve that problem using the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm, which can be used to calculate a path in the case where an object has a non-infinitesimal shape - which means, its rotation is very important, and determines which paths are viable, and which ones aren’t.
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Excellent animation and style. The pacing, jokes and storytelling were excellent. I can you have put a lot of effort into this, and thus it pains me to say that I didn’t really learn any interesting insight or different way of looking at things. The execution was very good, but the topic was too simple for SoME in my opinion
The animation is quite good, beautiful. But after watching, I didn’t really learn anything, it’s just: okay, there’s an A-start algorithm, and use something like ray to explore, but how exactly? I don’t know.
Please don’t joke about whales dying
This was very entertaining, and I was immediately “reeled in” :D Novelty and creativity were definitely something I was looking for when marking, as a lot of maths videos are starting to feel a bit dull and samey nowadays. I also liked how concise it was.
However I was left at the end with a lot of questions that maybe the video could have addressed more clearly:
- How does the algorithm prevent revisiting visited areas?
- What is the optimality of the path found?
- Performance? (A discussion on time / space complexity in comparison to other approaches would’ve been nice).
- Effects of tweaking each of the parameters?
I also was left not fully understanding why it would be used over other path finding algorithms which can also handle constraints.
For that reason it fell slightly short on the motivation and clarity pieces of the marking criteria.
I’m glad I got to watch this, it was fun and I learned something new. I’ll be looking forward to your future uploads!
Bit too weird.
Saying “We can’t use classic A*” is way too sudden of a jump as the actual first mathematical sentence in the video.
It’s a matter of taste, but I don’t think the whale example adds much value; it just takes up time unnecessarily. That’s a shame, because the visual description of the algorithm is otherwise excellent. It would have been useful and instructive to spend some time tweaking the parameters—just one or two examples to demonstrate how sensitive the behavior is to those settings.
I really love this one. Amazing handmade Godot animation, a seemingly silly question, and a surprisingly good explanation.
Excellent animations of the algorithm. I’d need more explanation to really understand the algorithm, but this was a good intro.