A few weeks back, I picked up a copy of James Buck's Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages. (The title is, of course, an homage to one of the original text adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure, or Adventure for short, which featured a maze puzzle where every room was described as "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"). I read through most of it on my veranda in the mornings, looking out over Long Bay in Antigua while I was on vacation, wishing I had brought my laptop along with me (although my girlfriend is probably happy I did not...). Once I got back, I started diving into implementing some of the ideas from the book - it's been quite a joy, and a much needed break from debugging UCWA applications at the day job.
The code in the book is implemented in Ruby, however, I'm not a Rubyist, so I decided that I'd work through the examples in my language of choice, C#. The code is pretty simple, so porting it over has been pretty straight-forward. I also figured it would be an interesting exercise for trying out some of the newer features in the more recent versions of C# - I've been stuck using C# 5.0 due to some tooling that we haven't had a chance to upgrade yet at work. Today, I'm going to mostly cover the examples from Chapter 2, which lays out the general plumbing of the framework that the rest of the book builds on, and implements two simple maze-building algorithms, the Binary Tree and Sidewinder algorithms. For the full code, you can check out my GitHub repository; things there may change slightly from the version presented here as I work through more of the book, but the general structure should remain similar.
Video:
http://richardssoftware.blob.core.windows.net/video/binaryTree.mp4
http://richardssoftware.blob.core.windows.net/video/sidewinder.mp4
