As a follow-up to this recent post, I decided to add a couple of metrics to the previous graph and try it out with Refinery. And here’s the updated graph for you to try for yourselves.
The first metric relates to the pathfinding capability, and I’ve called it “Access”. There are a few things going on, here: for sure we want to measure the shortest average path, but also to disqualify (or at least penalise) designs that don’t have paths to all of of our points of interest (i.e. the corners). But I also wanted to weight the results to favour a balanced set of paths: designs that have the focal point near one corner would have at least one really short path along with other much longer paths.
The first thing to check was the number of paths: if it’s not the same as the number of corners, we set the metric’s value to be the diagonal distance across the bounding box. This should be high enough to disqualify the result from our optimisation.
Assuming we have the right…