The maze navigation problem is a classic computer science problem that is closely related to creating autonomous navigation agents that can find a path through ambiguous environments. The maze environment is an illustrative domain for the class of problems that have a deceptive fitness landscape. This means that the goal-oriented fitness function can have steep gradients of fitness scores in dead ends in the maze that are close to the final goal point. Such areas of the maze become the local optima for objective-based search algorithms that may converge in these areas. When the search algorithm converges in such deceptive local optima, it cannot find an adequate maze-solver agent.

In the following example, you can see a two-dimensional maze with local optima dead ends, which are shaded in:

The maze configuration in...