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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

I've always been a fan of generating mazes by randomly printing /, \, or a space. It ends up slanted, and there's obviously no guarantees of solvability, but it's surprisingly good for how simple it is.

Here's a bash version in 50 characters (https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/26011/7934):

    w=(╱ ╲);while :;do echo -n ${w[RANDOM%2]};done

and how it looks like:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/fRX05.png

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> there's obviously no guarantees of solvability

In fact, as the size of the maze goes to infinity, the probability of solvability goes to zero. Source: https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/32381/20581

This is the modern equivalent of the classic Commodore BASIC

    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

There's an entire book on this subject: https://10print.org

I can't recommend it without reservation, but if you're curious what a whole book about one line of code is like, you can find out.

That looks like a variant of Truchet Tiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truchet_tiles

> w=(╱ ╲);while :;do echo -n ${w[RANDOM%2]};done

Here is my orthogonal version:

`w=(├┤┴┬─\|);while :;do echo -n ${w:$RANDOM%6:1};done`

It is based on the 1-liner discussed at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPtjcSsS2MI>, and uses the PETSCII characters within Unicode.

Screenshot: <https://imgur.com/a/YrvpAqZ> (from `cool-retro-term`'s Apple II profile resized to 80x25, to sort of replicate a Commodore PET's look)

I don’t think there’s any spaces in that screenshot

Surprisingly good for what purpose?

probably fun

It's not much fun to solve because there's no guarantee that a path exists between any given openings on the edge, so it's mostly just "pick a point on the edge at random and see how far you can get". However, it does look very pretty.

It's fast enough that you can just check possible outcomes for whatever criterion you want.

Generating mazes

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