Last time, I had started working through Jamis Buck's Mazes for Programmers. I've made quite a lot of progress in the meantime, but haven't managed to keep up with posting about that progress. Today, we're going to work through the meat of Chapter 3, where we'll implement a simplified version of Dijkstra's Algorithm (really a breadth-first search), which we'll use to find paths through our mazes. We will also use this algorithm to help visualize the biases that exist in our two previous maze generation algorithms, by coloring the backgrounds of each cell according to its distance from a starting point.
You can download the code for this post by downloading or cloning the Post_2 branch from my GitHub. Going forward, I'm going to try and tag the code for each post in a new branch - I'm still used to the old SVN model, but I'm trying to figure out how to take advantage of Git a little more.
Below you can see an example of where we'll end up, drawing the longest path through a maze, and coloring each cell according to its distance along the path.
Let's get started!
