I came across some youtube videos of Micromouse competitions completly by chance a few weeks ago. I wa struck by how impressive the engineering was to make the

I came across some youtube videos of Micromouse competitions completly by chance a few weeks ago. I wa struck by how impressive the engineering was to make the little things go and corner so quickly. At the same time I noticed there was still what I would consider low-hanging-fruit. Specifically one of the mazes had a dead-end of depth one that most of the mice tried going down after passing it in favour of a longer dead-end path. It strikes me that you could sense simple cases like this as you go past them. If I were to have a go (I have been somewhat tempted since discovering this was a thing) I would try a sonar ping to compare against a dictionary of known simple configurations. It's something that would be in the realms of possibility for modern microcontrollers. Then if you pass an intersection, you can ping them all and eliminate any known dead ends. I did see one that raised a camera to scan the map, but it took a long time processing the data.