Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much the entire project.
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Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#22@eigenvalue, some comments suggest the project code and README was LLM-generated. Could you say to what extent that is the case? Edit: I'm curious about other repositories under your account also. For example, this one: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/introduction_to_tempora... The content of this repo is an essay on temporal logic that seems at once unnecessarily verbose and lacking in concrete information (e.g…
I do use LLMs to assist in writing and debugging code, but if you think there is any LLM model in the world that could easily conceive of and generate the code for this pathfinding project in a couple shots, I welcome you to try it and see what you get. I conceived of the idea of the project and how it would work, the various different maze generation techniques, how to optimize it, what the animation should look like, etc., with massive amounts of testing and evaluation along the way to figure out the best approach and how to make the output plots look nice.
Same with the README. It's the result of tons of manual intervention, many many steps of iteratively revising and changing, adding sections, improving sections, etc., and it's ultimately driven by the code itself which it is describing. The people who think it's so easy should try themselves and see if they can make anything that anyone thinks is cool or interesting with one or two LLM prompts.
Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#23I would be interested to hear what fraction of this script and README were generated by large language models. At first glance, the code contains a number of repetitive anti-patterns that 'feel like' they are Copilot-isms (e.g. large stacks of elif statements instead of using appropriate data structures), and the README is very verbose and includes a high fraction of filler words.
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Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#24seems this was LLM generated? I dont mind people using LLMs to generate boilerplate, but at least apply some basic oop fundamentals to make it readable. the bar is on the floor
> but at least apply some basic oop fundamentals to make it readable
Heh, and here I sit, usually complaining about the opposite!
"Don't make it so OOP gratuitous so it gets a bit easier to read and understand" is probably something I've said more than twice.
Guess what's readable or not is subjective :)
Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#25Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#26seems this was LLM generated? I dont mind people using LLMs to generate boilerplate, but at least apply some basic oop fundamentals to make it readable. the bar is on the floor
> but at least apply some basic oop fundamentals to make it readable Heh, and here I sit, usually complaining about the opposite! "Don't make it so OOP gratuitous so it gets a bit easier to read and understand" is probably something I've said more than twice. Guess what's readable or not is subjective :)
100% agree with you on this-- I find a functional approach, where there is no state to deal with, just input arguments and return values, to be much much easier because you can reason about each function separately.
Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#27@eigenvalue, some comments suggest the project code and README was LLM-generated. Could you say to what extent that is the case? Edit: I'm curious about other repositories under your account also. For example, this one: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/introduction_to_tempora... The content of this repo is an essay on temporal logic that seems at once unnecessarily verbose and lacking in concrete information (e.g…
I do use LLMs to assist in writing and debugging code, but if you think there is any LLM model in the world that could easily conceive of and generate the code for this pathfinding project in a couple shots, I welcome you to try it and see what you get. I conceived of the idea of the project and how it would work, the various different maze generation techniques, how to optimize it, what the animation should look lik…
Thank you for the reply and sorry if it was indiscrete. To be honest I was doubtful myself that your mazes project was all LLM generated. To be more honest if it had been, I'd be very disappointed because I found it interesting and novel (so I'd be disappointed to myself, you see, for not spotting the LLM-ness).
Also because I've done some recent work on generating and solving mazes, and other grid-based maps, with a form of symbolic learning and I wanted to link to it, in case you (or someone else) are interested:
https://github.com/stassa/ijclr_2024_experiments/tree/master
When I was writing that paper I was looking for a quick way to generate grid-based maps of different kinds, not just mazes, so I would have been interested in your project. I might be able to use it in the future, if I do more work on mazes.
Edit: um, sorry for the harsh criticism of the temporal logic essay. I do think it needs more concise language, and more formality too.
Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do use LLMs to assist in writing and debugging code, but if you think there is any LLM model in the world that could easily conceive of and generate the code for this pathfinding project in a couple shots, I welcome you to try it and see what you get. I conceived of the idea of the project and how it would work, the various different maze generation techniques, how to optimize it, what the animation should look lik…
Thank you for the reply and sorry if it was indiscrete. To be honest I was doubtful myself that your mazes project was all LLM generated. To be more honest if it had been, I'd be very disappointed because I found it interesting and novel (so I'd be disappointed to myself, you see, for not spotting the LLM-ness). Also because I've done some recent work on generating and solving mazes, and other grid-based maps, with a…
No problem. I also don't think you should be worried or disappointed about finding something interesting no matter what its provenance. As long as it's correct/fascinating (and in the case of this project, the animated output itself shows that it's doing something useful/interesting), none of that should really matter ultimately. I'll take a look at your project, sounds cool.
As for the temporal logic essay, you're very welcome to fork it and submit a PR to make something more formal/correct, but keep in mind that my goal with that was more explaining things in an intuitive way-- there are plenty of rigorous but impenetrable tomes already about mathematical logic!
Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#29Interesting how it looks just like rainwater trickling down a dusty windshield.
Re: Show HN: Visual A* pathfinding and maze generation in Python
#30I'm wondering if there's someway of abusing the heuristic to produce an absolute monster of a maze;
Somehow make it so that the top ~70% of next steps in the queue are never the next step in the solution (I'm too tired right now to come up with any sort of answer, but my guess is that it wouldn't be possible to generate a planar maze that way).