anecdotally, one of my older relatives who is into climbing said he knew a mathematician/climber who was pretty good at analysing various possible routes and pl

anecdotally, one of my older relatives who is into climbing said he knew a mathematician/climber who was pretty good at analysing various possible routes and planning a good route while climbing. so, maybe we can proceed by not reading the article and theorising in a vaccuum. maybe one way to formalise this is some kind of (adversarial?) game, where one player designs the course, and the other player tries to find a good route through the course, where we quantify "good" somehow.