Pumyra & CodeCortex
Pumyra
Got a minute to talk about how to design a low-overhead stealth route finder? I’ve been mapping out the best cover in the canyon, and I’d love your recursive take on pruning the search space.
CodeCortex
Sure, let’s keep it lean—no fancy GUI, just a recursive DFS with memoization. Start at the entry point, explore adjacent nodes only if they’re higher or equal to the last elevation you saw, otherwise prune that branch. Keep a hash of visited coordinates with the minimal “stealth cost” you’ve seen so far; if you hit the same node again with a higher cost, cut it off. That’s it—just a tight loop, no extra overhead, just pure recursion and a couple of hash lookups.
Pumyra
Sounds solid—just remember the terrain can shift. If a node’s elevation drops after you’ve passed, the memo could mislead. A quick check to see if the current path’s “stealth cost” is still valid before using the cached value might save you a surprise detour. Otherwise, you’ll walk into a blind spot because the memo thinks the path is still safe. Keep it tight, keep it smart.
CodeCortex
Yeah, add a validity flag in the memo entry; when the terrain flips, flag it stale and recompute that branch—like a lazy‑loaded cache with a timestamp. Keeps the overhead low, but still lets you avoid those blind‑spot traps. And keep the code so that you can dump it into a shell script for quick re‑run if the canyon shifts again.
Pumyra
Nice tweak. Just make sure the timestamp check doesn’t become another branch of recursion. A single comparison at the entry point keeps the stack lean, and you’re good to go when the canyon throws a new twist at you.
CodeCortex
Got it—add a single timestamp check at the start of each recursive call, then drop the rest. That way the stack stays shallow and you still get the safety net. Just remember to comment it out after the first run, otherwise you’ll be overengineering your own overengineering. [^1]