Eli5: How does navigation software plot out the best route?

Question

I’ve tried googling it and all I get is “Map starting point + map second point + MAGIC = best route”.

In: 1

Answer 1

At it’s most fundamental, what it’s doing is just trying every single possibility and measuring which one is the fastest. There are tons of ways to optimize this so it only checks a much smaller more reasonable subset of all possibilities, but these are going to vary from software to software. At it’s core it’s still “try a bunch of routes and see which one is the fastest”.