Mazes for Programmers

Braiding Mazes

A maze with no dead ends is called a braid maze.

There’s no reason this has to be all-or-nothing, though. Mazes may be heavily braided (with all or most dead ends removed), or lightly braided (with only a few dead ends removed), or anything in-between. The process we’ll consider here, called dead-end culling, will let us produce a maze with any level of braiding we desire.

Recall back in ​Counting Dead Ends​, we added a method to Grid called, appropriately, deadends. We made it return a list of all the dead-end cells in the grid, and used it to compare maze algorithms based on how many dead ends they generated.

It turns out that ...