Mazes for Programmers

Coloring Your Mazes

It turns out that coloring mazes in a particular way acts like an X-ray machine, letting us peer inside and get a much clearer view of the structure of a maze and of the algorithm that generated it. Dijkstra’s algorithm is ideal for this, because of that matrix of numbers it generates. Every cell with the same distance value has one thing in common: they all are equidistant from the starting cell. This is just crying for a paint-by-number exercise.

The easiest way to do this is to treat each number as an intensity value, relative to the length of the longest path. It works even better if we invert the logic, too, treating the cells with the largest distance values as being darkest, and the cell that we started with (which ...