Mazes for Programmers

Chapter 8Exploring Other Grids

When you take a surface and divide it up into different shapes, with no gaps between them and no overlaps, you get what is called a tessellation of the surface. Our standard grid is one such tessellation, where we’ve broken up a flat area, or plane, into smaller squares. Another way to say this is that we’ve tiled the plane with squares.

It turns out that squares aren’t the only shape that can do this for us. In this chapter, we’ll look at two other grids made by tiling other geometric shapes. We’ll see how hexagons come together in a honeycomb pattern and triangles form a girder-style lattice. Over the course of the chapter, we’ll use these new grids to turn out mazes like the following:

Let’s start with the ...