Imagine you have to transfer N ants from A to B on an Ant Farm (a graph) in the fastest possible way.

This program finds the best set of paths on a graph and does all the work!

• You have a bunch of ants and a graph
• Graph contains rooms (vertices) with unique names and links (edges) between these rooms
• You can move as many ants as you want per step
• You can't move an ant twice per step
• Room can contain at most one ant at a time (except start and end)

The program tries to build a graph from user input and finds the best set of paths for transfer.

Lets describe a simple graph:

On the first line, you have to specify ants count:

100

Then, the program expects to read a list of rooms:

green 0 0
purple 0 0
deadEnd 0 0
blue 0 0
red 0 0

Two of them have to be marked as start and end rooms:

##start
start 0 0

##end
end 0 0

Finally, link existing rooms between each other:

start-green
start-purple
start-deadEnd
start-blue
blue-red
red-end
green-purple
purple-end
green-end

# ants count
100
# rooms
green 0 0
purple 0 0
deadEnd 0 0
blue 0 0
red 0 0
##start
start 0 0
##end
end 0 0
# links
start-green
start-purple
start-deadEnd
start-blue
blue-red
red-end
green-purple
purple-end
green-end

As a result, Lem-in V2 shows a list of some considered paths and the best set (with steps count - e):

Found paths (5):
path_0 (3) [start, green, end]
path_1 (3) [start, purple, end]
path_2 (4) [start, blue, red, end]
path_3 (4) [start, green, purple, end]
path_4 (4) [start, purple, green, end]

Best set (s = 3, e = 35):
path_0 (3) [start, green, end]
path_1 (3) [start, purple, end]
path_2 (4) [start, blue, red, end]

0. Ensure you have installed Java.
1. Clone: git clone https://github.com/ollevche/lem-in-v2 && cd lem-in-v2
2. Build via gradle wrapper: ./gradlew
3. Run jar file: java -jar build/libs/lemin-2.0.jar
4. Get rid of this annoying problem with pathfinding when transferring ants on a graph!

This project is a part of the 42 School's Algorithmic branch.

Originally, it has been implemented in C (here is the repo), this is Java version with a faster algorithm.