Comment by dsilver
12 years ago
Part of a whole family of maze visualizations created in the past day by Mike Bostock:
Maze Generator: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11159599
Maze Solver: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11161648
Maze Flooder: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11167589
Maze Solver with Best-First Search Algorithm: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11189414
(Edit: Best-First Search, not A*.)
It's awesome to see interesting algorithm visualizations in D3 (or other web standards) as opposed to Java applets. Especially as a student who has to do algorithm visualizations... in Java applets.
A few years back Jamis Buck did a survey of maze generation algorithms: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit.... The different algorithms seem to create mazes with different 'feels' to them. For instance recursive division algorithm appears more blocky and some have more dead ends than others. This d3 generator appears to be toothy (lots of short dead ends) on the right edge of the maze.
Interesting! I did a maze flooder last year http://bl.ocks.org/robinhouston/6023888/653206574a69127d7fa2... using uniformly random mazes[★], and the flood-filling is much less uniform. The uniformity here must be a reflection of the way the maze was generated.
★ There are algorithms that generate each possible maze with equal probability, if by maze you mean a spanning tree of the grid graph. I used such an algorithm, Wilson's algorithm.
Maze Flooder is mesmerizing.