Mazes for Programmers

Your Turn

As was pointed out, the statistics presented in this appendix are very superficial. There is a lot more that could be done. If statistics are your thing, you might want to consider analyzing other aspects of these algorithms. Maybe some of the following will inspire you!

• An analysis of the path lengths leading away from the longest path. This could give you a better idea of how far someone might go astray (though it would be an expensive number to compute!).

• Ratio of dead ends to path length. Many dead ends with a longer average path length suggests you might get very lost down a side road!

• Ratio of directness to twistiness. An algorithm with a very high ratio would have relatively few turns. Pac-Man’s maze, for instance, would be more ...