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Yeah, I'm pretty sure the site you linked is wrong too, and I think the author doesn't realize it, because he says: > My last post was about using Kruskal’s al
by sltkr 12y ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the site you linked is wrong too, and I think the author doesn't realize it, because he says:
> My last post was about using Kruskal’s algorithm to generate random mazes. This article is about using another minimal spanning tree algorithm to do the same: Prim’s algorithm.
But his implementation is NOT the same! (His implementation of Kruskal's algorithm does look correct.) Extracting elements at a random index is not equivalent to assigning random weights to elements and extracting the minimum-weight elements.
- mbostock 12y agoI spoke to Jamis Buck on Twitter. It’s called “Randomized Prim’s” on Wikipedia [1], but of course Wikipedia is not authoritative. It does seem confusing to call it a variant of Prim’s given how different the behavior is. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_generation_algorithm#Randomized_Prim.27s_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_generation_algorithm#Rando...
- sltkr 12y agoI see -- apparently it's common to call this "Prim's algorithm" even though it is more accurately described as a randomized variant of breadth/depth-first search. Thanks for clarifying that. I do still object to the text reading "This article is about using another minimal spanning tree algorithm to do the same" -- what is described there is not a minimal spanning tree algorithm (even if it's called Prim's algorithm).