Chapter 1 Your First Random Mazes

Mazes for Programmers — by Jamis Buck (7 / 121)

👈 Part 1 The Basics | TOC | Preparing the Grid 👉

Maze-making seems magical when you’re outside looking in, but don’t be fooled. There is no magic. Starting on this very page, we’ll begin demystifying the processes that drive maze generation. We’ll see the scaffolding that lies just beneath their surface. We’ll get specific, talking about what exactly mazes are, and then we’ll get the ball rolling with two simple ways to create mazes, walking through them together with paper and pencil.

Eventually, this will take us to some exciting places, but like most beginnings, ours is quite humble. Here, it all starts with algorithms.

We’re going to focus on those algorithms that produce mazes randomly. Passage length, the number of dead ends, crossroad frequency, and how often passages branch will all be determined by randomly choosing from a prescribed list of possibilities.

There is no universally ideal algorithm for generating mazes, so over the course of this book we’ll explore twelve different ones. You’ll learn how to choose between them depending on your project’s needs, such as speed, memory efficiency, or simplicity (or even your own personal sense of aesthetics!). On top of that, most of the algorithms have little idiosyncrasies that cause the mazes they generate to share some feature, like short, stubby passages, or maybe the passages all skew a certain direction. We’ll explore those, too.

But we’ll get to that. By the end of this book you’ll be an expert, able to nimbly switch between these different algorithms to choose just the right one for the job. You’ll be pounding these out in code before you know it.

First, though, let’s do it on paper.

Joe asks:

What’s an Algorithm?

An algorithm is just a description of a process. Like a recipe in a cookbook, it tells you what steps to take in order to accomplish some task. Any task. Algorithms exist for everything. If lasagna is your goal, then the steps you take to make lasagna are your algorithm. Want to make your bed, or drive to work? Both can be described as a series of steps. More algorithms! Algorithms launch rockets, land airplanes, drive cars, sort information, and search the Web. Algorithms solve mazes. And if you’re out to make a maze, like we are, your algorithm consists of the steps you take to make that maze.

👈 Part 1 The Basics | TOC | Preparing the Grid 👉

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