If you are looking for an elaborate explanation of what the phrase "shortest path" means, this might be helpful. Otherwise, I hate to be a hater but it's not really a great explanation of Dijkstra's algorithm. It certainly brings nothing new to the table "discussion"-wise.

Yeah, it just explains Dijkstra's and not very well. A big point is that Dijkstra's like many MST producing algorithms gives you A minimum spanning tree, not necessarily THE minimum spanning tree.

And why does the price of 2 drinks to the same vertex change? Shouldn't all edges on a vertex share the same cost if the edges are only weighted by the cost of 2 drinks? If the edges were a combination of drink and travel costs, maybe this makes more sense (though you still wouldn't see a $0 edge).

> A big point is that Dijkstra's like many MST producing algorithms gives you A minimum spanning tree

In general, the spanning tree produced by Dijkstra's algorithm isn't a MST at all.

For those interested in a broader take on search algorithms (with the end goal of explaining A*), this series of articles may be useful: http://gabrielgambetta.com/generic-search.html

I think you might be the author of this article, and if that is the case, for me in the demo it shows the Restart/Run/Step buttons as a code example and not as actual buttons. Not sure if that's intentional, but they do work otherwise.

Fixed! Thank you :)

This is a great link, thanks for sharing.

I certainly appreciate the comments, everyone. I intended for the article to be an introduction to Dijkstra's algorithm with the tone being less technical and more casual with the hopes of spurring in the budding developer further research into the algorithm and graph theory in general.

Like every post/article, this has been an exercise in finding the appropriate tone, subject, depth of content, etc. I have taken everyone's comments into consideration so far; they'll motivate me to revise my approach to writing, both in this article and subsequent articles.

Thanks again for the read :D And your time in commenting!

A revised version could be read at:

http://wind-up.ghost.io/an-introductory-overview-of-dijkstra...

TLDR: Just explains Dijkstra's Algorithm (example, Java code).