A Heuristic Approach to Indoor Rock Climbing Route Generation Frank Stapel University of Twente P.O. Box 217, 7500AE Enschede The Netherlands
[email protected] ABSTRACT routes can be used in many applications, of which two The problem of setting a good climbing route is faced in important applications come to mind: many ways around the world. This research looks into First of all, there is the setting of routes for competitions. the possibilities of generating climbing routes. We aim to A competition route needs to be increasingly difficult to achieve this by creating a greedy algorithm using heuris- distinguish climbers based on their climbing skills. Setting tics based on the analysis of existing climbing routes. The a route that is gradually increasing in difficulty has proven algorithm generates multiple routes using trees and deter- to be a hard task when looking back at the routes of the mines the quality of those routes. To make the research climbing World Cups of the last couple of years. Having feasible the algorithm was implemented using Python and a route generated that can gradually increase in difficulty applied to the structure and constraints of a MoonBoard. would be a solution to this problem. The generated routes were then compared to existing Moon- The second application lies in training. Training on a sys- Board routes by experienced climbers. Based on their tem board [1] can quickly get repetitive when a climber comparisons the quality of the routes was assessed based climbs a certain route multiple times as resistance train- on criteria found by analysis and evaluation of existing ing.