Posts with tag "Mazes"

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!

A few weeks back, I picked up a copy of James Buck's Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages. (The title is, of course, an homage to one of the original text adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure, or Adventure for short, which featured a maze puzzle where every room was described as "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"). I read through most of it on my veranda in the mornings, looking out over Long Bay in Antigua while I was on vacation, wishing I had brought my laptop along with me (although my girlfriend is probably happy I did not...). Once I got back, I started diving into implementing some of the ideas from the book - it's been quite a joy, and a much needed break from debugging UCWA applications at the day job.

The code in the book is implemented in Ruby, however, I'm not a Rubyist, so I decided that I'd work through the examples in my language of choice, C#. The code is pretty simple, so porting it over has been pretty straight-forward. I also figured it would be an interesting exercise for trying out some of the newer features in the more recent versions of C# - I've been stuck using C# 5.0 due to some tooling that we haven't had a chance to upgrade yet at work. Today, I'm going to mostly cover the examples from Chapter 2, which lays out the general plumbing of the framework that the rest of the book builds on, and implements two simple maze-building algorithms, the Binary Tree and Sidewinder algorithms. For the full code, you can check out my GitHub repository; things there may change slightly from the version presented here as I work through more of the book, but the general structure should remain similar.