Most of the time, we’ll need to find out the shortest path from single source to all other nodes or a specific node in a 2D graph. Say for example: we want to find out how many moves are required for a knight to reach a certain square in a chessboard, or we have an array where some cells are blocked, we have to find out the shortest path from one cell to another. We can move only horizontally and vertically. Even diagonal moves can be possible too. For these cases, we can convert the squares or cells in nodes and solve these problems easily using BFS. Now our visited, parent and level will be 2D arrays. For each node, we’ll consider all possible moves. To find the distance to a specific node, we’ll also check whether we have reached our destination.

There will be one additional thing called direction array. This will simply store the all possible combinations of directions we can go to. Let’s say, for horizontal and vertical moves, our direction arrays will be:

+----+-----+-----+-----+-----+
| dx |  1  |  -1 |  0  |  0  |
+----+-----+-----+-----+-----+
| dy |  0  |   0 |  1  |  -1 |
+----+-----+-----+-----+-----+

Here dx represents move in x-axis and dy represents move in y-axis. Again this part is optional. You can also write all the possible combinations separately. But it’s easier to handle it using direction array. There can be more and even different combinations for diagonal moves or knight moves.

The additional part we need to keep in mind is:

Our pseudo-code will be:

Procedure BFS2D(Graph, blocksign, row, column):
for i from 1 to row
    for j from 1 to column
        visited[i][j] := false
    end for
end for
visited[source.x][source.y] := true
level[source.x][source.y] := 0
Q = queue()
Q.push(source)
m := dx.size
while Q is not empty
    top := Q.pop
    for i from 1 to m
        temp.x := top.x + dx[i]
        temp.y := top.y + dy[i]
        if temp is inside the row and column and top doesn't equal to blocksign
            visited[temp.x][temp.y] := true
            level[temp.x][temp.y] := level[top.x][top.y] + 1
            Q.push(temp)
        end if
    end for
end while
Return level

As we have discussed earlier, BFS only works for unweighted graphs. For weighted graphs, we’ll need Dijkstra’s algorithm. For negative edge cycles, we need Bellman-Ford‘s algorithm. Again this algorithm is single source shortest path algorithm. If we need to find out distance from each nodes to all other nodes, we’ll need Floyd-Warshall’s algorithm.