Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm can be used for full traversal (illustrated in the animation) where all the nodes are visited in order to determine all the distances between node
and node
. However, one can observe in the illustration that when nodes
,
and
are visited, the choice is given between following a path with weight
to
, a path of weight
to
and a path of weight
to
. In the illustration we chose a full traversal, that is, we visit
, even though we could have directly selected the shortest path with weight
from
to
.