Climbing pathfinding with the holds and a decision method of the difficulty level of the holds

There are a variety of sizes and thicknesses of holds used in climbing, and the ease of holding them varies greatly. However, the difficulty of holding has not been considered in previous studies on route exploration. In this study, we improved the search algorithm A* used in previous studies and incorporated the difficulty of the hold into the fitness. We also used the improved A* as the evaluation function to estimate the difficulty of holds using a genetic algorithm (GA). There was also no discussion on how many divisions of the hold should be divided by difficulty, so we assumed four divisions: 2, 4, 8, and 16 divisions. After adjusting the parameters during interviews with expert climbers, we compared the algorithm of the four divisions with that of previous studies using a questionnaire online. The results showed that the route of the algorithm, which considers the difficulty of the hold, was rated higher by expert climbers and that the 8-division algorithm was the best among the proposed methods.