How do I get the shortest route in a labyrinth?

Question

I want to make a code giving the shortest route when given a labyrinth as a matrix.

In this case, the matrix representation of this labyrinth is as follows.

## [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
## [1,] 2 0 0 0
## [2,] 1 1 0 1
## [3,] 0 1 0 0
## [4,] 1 1 1 3
 , where  0 denotes inaccessible points, 1 denotes accessible points.
          2 denotes the starting point, and 3 denotes the destination.

And, the desired result is this : c(4,1,4,4,1,1), where 1 denotes East, 2 denotes North, 3 denotes West, and 4 denotes South.

I guess that one possible code might be a function giving the shortest route as a vector when it is given the matrix representation of a labyrinth.

In addition to this case, I want to know if the coverage could be extended to general cases, though it seems rather redundant. I would like to know whether a desirable code can be made so that it covers arbitrary n by m size matrix, although just 4 by 4 case suffices. And I wonder if the start point and the destination could be located at arbitrary points other than vertices, though vertices case is sufficient.

Answer 1

You could construct a graph to represent the valid moves between positions in the matrix:

# Construct nodes and edges from matrix
(nodes <- which(m == 1 | m == 2 | m == 3, arr.ind=TRUE))
#       row col
#  [1,]   1   1
#  [2,]   2   1
#  [3,]   4   1
#  [4,]   2   2
#  [5,]   3   2
#  [6,]   4   2
#  [7,]   4   3
#  [8,]   2   4
#  [9,]   4   4
edges <- which(outer(seq_len(nrow(nodes)),seq_len(nrow(nodes)), function(x, y) abs(nodes[x,"row"] - nodes[y,"row"]) + abs(nodes[x,"col"] - nodes[y,"col"]) == 1), arr.ind=T)
(edges <- edges[edges[,"col"] > edges[,"row"],])
#      row col
# [1,]   1   2
# [2,]   2   4
# [3,]   4   5
# [4,]   3   6
# [5,]   5   6
# [6,]   6   7
# [7,]   7   9

library(igraph)
g <- graph.data.frame(edges, directed=FALSE, vertices=seq_len(nrow(nodes)))

Then you could solve the shortest path problem between the specified start and end location:

start.pos <- which(m == 2, arr.ind=TRUE)
start.node <- which(paste(nodes[,"row"], nodes[,"col"]) == paste(start.pos[,"row"], start.pos[,"col"]))
end.pos <- which(m == 3, arr.ind=TRUE)
end.node <- which(paste(nodes[,"row"], nodes[,"col"]) == paste(end.pos[,"row"], end.pos[,"col"]))
(sp <- nodes[get.shortest.paths(g, start.node, end.node)$vpath[[1]],])
#      row col
# [1,]   1   1
# [2,]   2   1
# [3,]   2   2
# [4,]   3   2
# [5,]   4   2
# [6,]   4   3
# [7,]   4   4

Finally, you could determine the direction (1: east; 2: north; 3: west; 4: south) as a simple manipulation of the final set of nodes selected:

dx <- diff(sp[,"col"])
dy <- -diff(sp[,"row"])
(dirs <- ifelse(dx == 1, 1, ifelse(dy == 1, 2, ifelse(dx == -1, 3, 4))))
# [1] 4 1 4 4 1 1

This code will work for arbitrarily sized input matrices.

Data:

(m <- matrix(c(2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 3), nrow=4))
#      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
# [1,]    2    0    0    0
# [2,]    1    1    0    1
# [3,]    0    1    0    0
# [4,]    1    1    1    3