Mazes for Programmers

Chapter 1Your First Random Mazes

Maze-making seems magical when you’re outside looking in, but don’t be fooled. There is no magic. Starting on this very page, we’ll begin demystifying the processes that drive maze generation. We’ll see the scaffolding that lies just beneath their surface. We’ll get specific, talking about what exactly mazes are, and then we’ll get the ball rolling with two simple ways to create mazes, walking through them together with paper and pencil.

Eventually, this will take us to some exciting places, but like most beginnings, ours is quite humble. Here, it all starts with algorithms.

We’re going to focus on those algorithms that produce mazes randomly. Passage length, the number of dead ends, crossroad frequency, and ...