Mathspp: mathematics and programming

Pt En In this previous post I shared some code and animations of an algorithm that created random mazes. I shared it with you and I got some feedback on Facebook, saying that even the stupidly large mazes I gave you were really easy to solve (I think this link can show you what I am talking about). So it was about time I got you some new mazes! And this time, I don't think they are as easy to solve as the old ones. The mazes I am sharing today were created by code found in this GitHub repo . The README will tell you to run the wilson_generator.py file. You can also download the (windows) executable that is zipped inside the wilsonExe rar. (please notice that in both cases, you can use the wilsonconfig.ini file to change the size of the maze) The way our algorithm works is really simple. It will start a random walk on the top left corner of the window. Whenever the random walk intersects itself (creating a loop), it removes the loop from the walk, and then c...

Pt En In today's post I will be sharing a game I made with just under $400$ lines in Processing, a wrapper for Java that makes drawing to the screen really easy. The goal of the game is really simple: go from the cell you are standing on (marked with the black outline of the ellipse, in the screenshot) to the cell that is framed in white. To do that, you can move a "cursor" (the black frame) with the $AWSD$ keys to choose the next cell you want to go to. To move, press the space bar. There are a couple of rules to moving, though: You can only move to the selected cell if it is in the same row or same column as the cell you are in; You can only move to the selected cell if it has the same colour or the same shape as the cell you are in. Rule number $1$ says you can only go in the directions these orange arrows cover: Rule number $2$ says that, from the cells specified by the above rule, you can only go to the white circle, diamond or vertical el...

Pt En In this post I just want to share a simple algorithm that I used to create random mazes. The idea came from an e-mail I got, about a past competition, where one of the contestants did this exact thing: a program to generate random mazes. I saw the animation of the program working here and I deduced how to do it. All the code can be found on GitHub , as well as an executable of the program, the animations from the beginning and end of this post, an image of a bigger maze, and this other animation: where you can see a different style of maze; a less straight one. The maze starts in the top left red corner and ends wherever the other red square is, which need not be on the bottom right corner. The algorithm is simple: travel randomly inside the black area without ever hitting a white path; whenever no random move can be made, start going back until you find a place where the path can branch out again. While we are creating white paths, keep updating the fin...