Wilson’s Algorithm

This is part of a very nice larger article by the same author on visualizing algorithms [0]. It covers sampling, shuffling, sorting, and maze generation.

[0]: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/

> an unbiased sample of all possible spanning trees

this also makes the mazes generated by the algorithm the most annoying to solve without a computer, but they are the most resistant to be searched in reverse of all the forward building algorithms (without explicit honeypots for trapping reversers)

Ah, this is very similar to some old maze generation toys I was working on a few years back. I was experimenting with adding a little extra stochasticity to the mix. E.g. selecting from the last ~30 neighbors added creates interesting mazes with "multiple growth fronts" rather than one tendril or a uniform expansion at the edge. You can see a GIF example here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/j-s-n/mazes/master/example...

(My code uses toroidal topology, which is why you can see things going off the edge and coming back on the other side.)

And things like varying whether new neighbors are added to the head or tail of the list adds a little perceptible chaos. It's too bad it looks like my demo site is down right now.

There's a (old, badly documented) JS demo here with about 6 variant algorithms: https://github.com/j-s-n/mazes-js

And a better documented but still out of date Python example (that hand-encodes an animated gif here): https://github.com/j-s-n/mazes

Even Richard Stallman doesn't agree with releasing such small snippets of code under the GPL. See his essays in "Free Software, Free Society."

Aside: The text doesn't show up without JavaScript. I wouldn't expect to see the animation, but why can't I read the text?

Ah, it's been a long time since we heard from Mike. I wonder how d3.express is coming along...

Very nice. I see the "entrance" but where is the "exit" to the maze? Doesn't it need one?