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Another interesting aspect of the grid coloring approach is that one can pre-bake larger rooms within a maze, which is useful when adding a maze to a different
by nanolith 10y ago
Another interesting aspect of the grid coloring approach is that one can pre-bake larger rooms within a maze, which is useful when adding a maze to a different style game, such as a first-person shooter or an RPG. Other features, which aren't provided by the standard Prim's Algorithm, such as 2.5D mazes (bridges and tunnels), or having more than one path to a given room, can be added after maze generation has been completed. A bridge, for instance, can be added by connecting two locations and adding a wall to block off one of the locations from the algorithmically defined path, if maze continuity is desired.
I played with using mazes as a way to find things that are quickly solved by machines but take some concentration from users, as a sort of anti-CAPTCHA test. Obviously, there are thousands of such potential tests, but mazes have an aesthetic appeal lacking, in say, "find the prime factors of this 128 bit number." A child can brute force a maze, as can any adult, given enough time. A machine breezes right through large mazes that could take hours for a human to solve by hand. When would such a test be useful? I'll leave that to the imagination of the reader.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> A machine breezes right through large mazes that could take hours for a human to solve by hand. When would such a test be useful? I'll leave that to the imagination of the reader. You could imagine androids using that as a sort of reverse-CAPTCHA to distinguish people from machines and preventing the latter from entering their secret gathering place. Which brings me to the last episode of Westworld... Boy, I have a theory about the Maze for you...
- dalke 10y agohttp://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/04/14/meanwhile-in-a-parallel-universe-3/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/04/14/meanwhile-in-a-para...
- 3pt14159 10y agoHmmmm. Sounds like a way of filtering out the non-determined, non-intelligent, and/or non-moneyed from a vast sea of candidates. So I would guess you were hiring junior game developer fresh out of college for a coveted opening?
- nanolith 10y agoNothing that extreme. This was more of a theoretical thing. Certainly, it could be used to filter people based on their ability to design a maze-solving heuristic, but some constraints would have to be placed on the test, as one can query Google for an A* implementation that could pretty easily solve this without having to understand basic recursive searches. If I were to design this as an interview problem, it would probably be for a general purpose solver and a pair programming exercise.