check this out for a modern example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExW_rxKdNJE
For those interested -- people are still interested in building maze solving robots, still called "micromouse". Here is one amazin micromouse that can traverse a maze and remember the solution very, very quickly. These days, its as much a mechanical problem (i.e. building a mouse that is robust, and has accurate sensors) as it is algorithmic.
My best guess is that they get earlier runs to "learn" the maze, then go for a speed run, is that right?
>The maze is made up of a 16 by 16 grid of cells, each 180 mm square with walls 50 mm high. The mice are completely autonomous robots that must find their way from a predetermined starting position to the central area of the maze unaided. The mouse will need to keep track of where it is, discover walls as it explores, map out the maze and detect when it has reached the goal. Having reached the goal, the mouse will typically perform additional searches of the maze until it has found an optimal route from the start to the center. Once the optimal route has been found, the mouse will run that route in the shortest possible time.
How does it move so smoothly?
(except much faster and bigger, of course)