Breadth-First Search

Edward F. Moore, 1959

Formalized by Edward F. Moore in 1959 for finding shortest paths in mazes, breadth-first search explores a graph by visiting all neighbors at the current depth before moving to the next level. It uses a queue to process nodes in order of discovery, guaranteeing the shortest path in unweighted graphs. The visualization shows a tree-like graph with the current node in gold, its frontier neighbors in translucent gold, and visited nodes turning teal as the wavefront expands outward.