Curious how typical “kids” mazes are made. They’ve got to be tough to see through to the end and usually cover much of the sheet. Similarly intrigued by the construction of cross word puzzles…
Anecdote: I learned BASIC in 1981, and one of my first programs generated mazes. I tested it a couple times on smaller grids, then submitted a job to fill an entire sheet of green bar paper. Next morning, I asked the operator for my printout, and got chewed out because they killed my job after it had consumed some insane amount of core time.
That was my first lesson in complexity. My program was something like O(N^3) or worse.
But I've read that good crossword puzzles are as much of a literary exercise as a computational one.
You might enjoy this: https://www.jamisbuck.org/mazes/. The section headers link to his (IMO really excellent) articles about maze generation algorithms, plus there’s a more comprehensive book you can buy.
(I doubt kid’s mazes are made using these precise algorithms, but either way they’re interesting!)
I guess his top argument was “climate change”. If that’s the go to we need to see what effect on climate change this 7T would have if invested elsewhere.
Some of the possibilities have a return on investment. Others don’t. The 7T assumes a positive ROI and while fundamental research is crucial to reversing the damage later, I’m not spilling any secrets that we will need 100 dead ends and 1000 incremental improvements before deployment of the next great tech.
As an ex scientist, I think basic algorithms theory should be incorporated into scientific computing classes. I took a few of these but none of the concepts from this area was covered. I remember well discovering some code of mine was slowing down with system size and finally realizing it was because “append” was creating a new array each step… had no clue that would happen. Was enthralled by the online algorithms course when I finally discovered it - hash tables!!!
