Mazes for Programmers

by Jamis Buck

TOC | Early praise for Mazes for Programmers 👉

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

About This Book

Online Resources

I. The Basics

1. Your First Random Mazes

Preparing the Grid

The Binary Tree Algorithm

The Sidewinder Algorithm

Your Turn

2. Automating and Displaying Your Mazes

Introducing Our Basic Grid

Implementing the Binary Tree Algorithm

Displaying a Maze on a Terminal

Implementing the Sidewinder Algorithm

Rendering a Maze as an Image

Your Turn

3. Finding Solutions

Dijkstra’s Algorithm

Implementing Dijkstra’s

Finding the Shortest Path

Making Challenging Mazes

Coloring Your Mazes

Your Turn

4. Avoiding Bias with Random Walks

Understanding Biases

The Aldous-Broder Algorithm

Implementing Aldous-Broder

Wilson’s Algorithm

Implementing Wilson’s Algorithm

Your Turn

5. Adding Constraints to Random Walks

The Hunt-and-Kill Algorithm

Implementing Hunt-and-Kill

Counting Dead Ends

The Recursive Backtracker Algorithm

Implementing the Recursive Backtracker

Your Turn

II. Next Steps

6. Fitting Mazes to Shapes

Introducing Masking

Implementing a Mask

ASCII Masks

Image Masks

Your Turn

7. Going in Circles

Understanding Polar Grids

Drawing Polar Grids

Adaptively Subdividing the Grid