Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday, 1 June 2018

The simplest code to generate a maze ?

Amazing [pun not intended, sorry] that something coherent can be generated through such absurdly simple, random code...


Originally shared by Norbert Landsteiner

I Declare Maze Day
Many amazing maze programs have been written for computers of all bread and kind, but, for some reason, there's no international Maze Day (while a few educational institutions in the US do have one of their own).

Here's one example, a quite famous BASIC one-liner for Commodore 8-bit computers generating a maze from just two characters ("\" and "/"):

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));: GOTO 10

Try it online: http://www.masswerk.at/pet/?run=maze

What may be a suitable date for Maze Day?
Do you remember any maze algorithms in particular?


6 comments:

  1. Python:

    import random, sys
    while True: sys.stdout.write(random.choice(u"╱╲"))

    Python3:

    import random
    while True: print(random.choice(u"╱╲"), end='')

    Other characters that work well
    fileformat.info - Unicode Characters in the Box Drawing Block

    ReplyDelete
  2. The code doesn't guarantee a solution path through the maze.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That's debatable. Generate a large enough maze and select a small enough area and you'll definitely have something with a navigable route. What it doesn't do is guarantee a solution within a fixed area.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I thought that font looked familiar...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I guess that depends on what one takes the entrance and exit definition to be. Left to right edges?

    ReplyDelete

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