How does Dijkstra's Algorithm and A-Star compare?

Posted by KingNestor on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by KingNestor
Published on 2009-08-26T05:15:58Z Indexed on 2010/05/22 23:10 UTC
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algorithm

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artificial-intelligence

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graphs

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a-star

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dijkstra

I was looking at what the guys in the Mario AI Competition have been doing and some of them have built some pretty neat Mario bots utilizing the A* (A-Star) Pathing Algorithm.

alt text
(Video of Mario A* Bot In Action)

My question is, how does A-Star compare with Dijkstra? Looking over them, they seem similar.

Why would someone use one over the other? Especially in the context of pathing in games?

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