Exploring Endless Space

Abstract

Summary 4X games are a genre of modern computer games, exemplified by the Civilization series, whose initial stages implicitly involve exploring an unknown graph. One exploration scheme is “move to nearest unvisited vertex” and this is in fact forced in the game Endless Space. We revisit the small body of old “worst case” results about the efficiency of this scheme, and comment on the unstudied “average case” problem.