People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes.Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
Dean Kamen
Jump point search is a variant of A* that cuts down on the search space by assuming you always want to continue in a straight line. As such, it runs remarkably faster on graphs that are mostly open.
For a fantastic introduction to how the algorithm works, check out zerowidth positive lookahead's excellent explanation.
jps is a Haskell implementation of jump point search. It was originally
written by Zachary Kamerling and is maintained by Sandy
Maguire.