"The 'direction' isn't a point on a map; it's a constant flight away from the past. The bot is always running away from its own breadcrumbs until it eventually runs out of world to explore."
Drunk Walker is a sandbox experiment in Blind Graph Traversal. It’s a bot that lives inside Google Street View, pressing "Up" and "Left" according to a simple set of rules designed to find the edges of the digital world.
It doesn't have a map. It doesn't know where it's going. It only knows where it has been, and it's constantly trying to be somewhere else.
You can swap the bot's "soul" on the fly using the control panel:
- 🌍 EXPLORER (The Expansionist): Runs away from its own history. It uses a Weighted Heatmap to find "cold" areas and rushes into them. If it hits a wall, it does a systematic scan to find a new path.
- 🏹 HUNTER (The Topological Sniper): Heads toward conflict. It looks for Cul-de-sacs and dead-ends—places where the digital metadata stops but the world continues. When it finds one, it performs a 180° Snap-Back turn and retreats to find the next one.
- 🔪 SURGEON (The Perfectionist): Hates wasted energy. It uses projection math to "veto" any direction it has already visited, aiming for a perfect 1:1 steps-to-discovery ratio.
- Memory & Scent: The bot keeps a heatmap of every location it visits and a rolling buffer of its last 20 steps (Breadcrumbs). This creates a "scent" that pushes it toward new territory.
- Physical Probing: The bot is "blind." It doesn't know a road exists until it tries to walk there. Every turn is a physical experiment.
- The Drift: Because we turn by time (ms) rather than degrees, the bot’s internal compass slowly drifts. This adds a layer of stochastic uncertainty, making every walk unique.
- Entropy Equilibrium: Eventually, the entire neighborhood becomes "hot" on the map. At this point, the bot reverts to pure randomness until it accidentally breaks out into a new area. Clearing the cache gives it Amnesia, allowing the expansion to start all over again.
- Go to Google Maps Street View
- Enter Street View mode
- Press F12 (Console)
- Visit genaforvena.github.io/drunk-walker/
- Click COPY LATEST
- Paste into console, press Enter
- Click START
- THE_TRAVERSAL_PROBLEM.md — Deep dive into the theory (no BS edition)
- ALGORITHM.md — The math behind the three modes
- DEVELOPER.md — How to build and test
This is a technical experiment for fun. It is not a tool for mass scraping. Use it to explore the weird edges of digital maps.
Not affiliated with Google or Google Maps.
Created with confused ❤️.