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I am looking for an explanation why the AStar / A* algorithm is called AStar. All similar (shortest path problem) algorithms are often named like its developer(s), so what is AStar standing for?
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astar (not comparable) (predicative) Covered with bright or sparkling objects.
Astar - Girl's name meaning, origin, and popularity | BabyCenter.
The surname Star comes from the Old English words sterre, or starre, which mean star, and would have been given to someone with a bright personality. This word was also used to refer to a white patch of hair on the forehead of a horse, an so, it may have been transferred to refer to someone with a streak of white hair.
Aster is a gender-neutral name of Greek origin, meaning “star.” Aster is also a flower, named for its star-like appearance, and was considered sacred to the Greek and Roman deities.
There were algorithms called A1 and A2. Later, it was proved that A2 was optimal and in fact also the best algorithm possible, so he gave it the name A* which symbolically includes all possible version numbers.
Source:
In 1964 Nils Nilsson invented a heuristic based approach to increase the speed of Dijkstra's algorithm. This algorithm was called A1. In 1967 Bertram Raphael made dramatic improvements upon this algorithm, but failed to show optimality. He called this algorithm A2. Then in 1968 Peter E. Hart introduced an argument that proved A2 was optimal when using a consistent heuristic with only minor changes. His proof of the algorithm also included a section that showed that the new A2 algorithm was the best algorithm possible given the conditions. He thus named the new algorithm in Kleene star syntax to be the algorithm that starts with A and includes all possible version numbers or A*
Nosrati, Masoud, Ronak Karimi, and Hojat Allah Hasanvand. "Investigation of the(star) search algorithms: Characteristics, methods and approaches." World Applied Programming 2.4 (2012): 251-256.*
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