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  • Hello.

  • Whilst recently on my holidays, I met a strange man, and he told me I had two minutes to create a maze that would take him longer than one minute to solve.

  • So I did this and send sold that though, Ugo.

  • And if you haven't guessed already, this video is about mazes, but more specifically it's about algorithms.

  • And this isn't out with them that I've loved since I was a child.

  • I first encountered it in the BBC Micro magazines.

  • When you have to type in the program's yourself from acres and acres of source listing, rarely did the programs actually work.

  • But this one always stuck with me because it's a fantastic out with them and it's perfect and it's complete, and we'll look at the details of it later.

  • And I think is a great example of programming and computer science at its absolute best.

  • Just in case you're wondering today I am living proof that programmers and code is actually go outside.

  • So there we go.

  • Now, before we get stuck into the code, I'm just gonna provide a quick primer for the uninitiated, and that is what is a stack because this is fundamentally a stack based algorithm and a stack can also be known as a life Oh, which stands for last in first out.

  • Some people may also call it the file.

  • Oh, it's the same thing.

  • And the idea is, I wanted to imagine a box like this on if we put some data into this box, it sits at the bottom.

  • And then if we put in some more data into the box, it sits on top.

  • But we can't access this data at the bottom anymore.

  • We can only take off the last bit of data that was put on.

  • There's a little bit of terminology.

  • We always push items onto the stack and we pop items from the stack on the top of the stack is always the most recent item that was pushed onto it now because this is a video primarily about algorithms, I'm not gonna go into the implementation of the stack.

  • There are many ways to do it.

  • Suffice it to say that if your system or your code uses a stack, it will behave like this.

  • Now the algorithm I'm going to talk about for developing a maze is known as the recursive backtracking on one sure of the origins of this algorithm, but it has been around for a very long time and has some fantastic properties.

  • But whenever you want to write code that involves a more complex algorithm than normal, it's always good to get the pen and paper out first, make sure you understand it.

  • So I'm going to go through it by hand here on this very simple mate.

  • And it's four by four.

  • And along the top here along my X axis, I've got four cell 0123 and I've got my y axis going down.

  • My plan is to fill this four by four array with the maze.

  • And I'm going to start by arming my stack with some data, and I'm gonna arm it with starting coordinate, which in this case, is going to be 00 So that's zero along and zero down on the mark, that cell as being visited.

  • So any cells that have a blue blob in the middle are going to be visited on.

  • I'm going to get a tick here, and I'll know when to stop my algorithm because I should have visited all of the cells at the end on out, therefore half 16 ticks.

  • Now I'm not going to make you sit through all of this.

  • I will speed up parts of it.

  • But it's a nice visual example of how the algorithm is put together.

  • Don't forget that even though there's only one item in my stack, the top of my stack is 00 on the algorithm goes like this from my current position, which is the top of the stack.

  • I've got to choose one of my neighbors randomly.

  • So from position 00 here, I've got a choice off this neighbor 10 or this neighbor zero warm.

  • I roll the dice, create a random number, and I select 01 So I set that cell to be visited, and I create a link update my visited count, and I've pushed the new location onto the top off my stack.

  • So now I repeat, I look at my immediate neighbors and choose one of them randomly that I've not already visited.

  • So my immediate neighbors consist of 00110 too.

  • Well, 00 doesn't count because I've already visited it.

  • After rolling my dice, I've decided that I'm going to move east.

  • I create a link to it.

  • Push the new cell onto the top of my stack.

  • Martin's cell is visited.

  • So one more time with commentary for completeness.

  • I take the top of my stack.

  • I choose a random, direct neighbor.

  • So in this case, I've got 10 21 01 and 12 I can't use this neighbor because I've already visited randomly choosing.

  • I'm going to go again to the east, push the new coordinates, the top of my stack and update my visited count.

  • So now I've let the algorithm run for a few alterations and we've hit a problem.

  • I now need to choose a neighbor.

  • There's not been visited before.

  • So my immediate neighbors air, of course.

  • Now 00 11 and 20 However, they've all been visited.

  • So I have no neighbors which haven't been visited.

  • I've now got to backtrack.

  • And this is where the stack became useful.

  • The stack contains a history of all the locations that I visited.

  • So the top of my stack is my current location.

  • And if I pop the top of the stack, I can move back one But note I don't remove anything from the visited column on here or face the same situation.

  • All of my neighbors are visited before, so I've got to move back one by popping off the top of the stack.

  • Now I'm back at this location.

  • This is the first cell as we're backtracking.

  • That's got a neighbor that I can actually plot into, which in this case is three to all of the other neighbors are not available.

  • They've already been visited, so I got little choice.

  • I've got to go here.

  • This is a new cell, so it becomes visited.

  • We pop the location onto the stack.

  • Now we'll let the algorithm continue again.

  • But now if it's a dead end again, as we can see, I've got no neighbors which have not previously visited.

  • So I've got to backtrack, and I do that by popping the top off the stack and using the top of the stack to set my current position.

  • And when I get to this location, I do have one neighbor I've not already visited, and it's the only one I can choose.

  • And so here I've now got 16 ticks, which is the number of cells that I visited.

  • This album is really nice because it guarantees completeness.

  • It doesn't matter how big my mazes it will fill all of the cells, and it guarantees that every cell can touch every other cell.

  • So it doesn't matter where you start in the maze, you guaranteed to get to the objective location within the maze.

  • Unlike all perfect algorithms, it's completely scalable, not just in terms of dimensions of the maze, but in how you apply.

  • In this case, I've got a single cell where I can visit my immediate neighbors north, south, east and west.

  • But it needn't be the case.

  • I could have many neighbors and applied the same algorithm and get a perfectly complete maze out of it.

  • Once you visited all the cells, it's up to your rendering algorithm to then try and draw the maze.

  • So in this case, I'm going to fill in wherever I haven't got a link between two cells.

  • So I'm going to draw a line here on here on here.

  • Once I filled in all the lines, I've effectively just developed the walls from my maze, at which point we no longer need the stack and we can get rid of all of this construction data, which leaves us with a really nice, albeit rather small, maze like structure.

  • Now let's see how we would do this in code.

  • I'm going to start with a blank in Maine program, as I always do, and I'm going to pull in the one lone Coder Consul game engine, which you can see in the video marks in the little tab above.

  • Now, since this is the first video I've done that uses the technology, I'm only going to go over it very briefly because you can look at that other video for the finer details.

  • But ultimately, I need to derive a class from my counsel game engine, which just handles all of the consoles stuff for me.

  • If you've seen my other videos, you'll know that all of my programs involved creating a screen buffer and using get a stinky state to emulate some sort of game engine.

  • I've wrapped that up into a nice, tidy package that I've called the one lone code, a console game engine and their two functions in this on user create, which is where we do all of our definitions and creating of resources and on user update, which is basically a per frame function.

  • So this is where we put all the fun stuff, and implementing the class couldn't be simpler.

  • We just create the variable.

  • We construct the console to the dimensions that we want.

  • So in this case is 100 60 characters across by 100 wide, and each council character is going to be eight by eight pixels, and then we call the start function.

  • This is only for Windows.

  • The construct council function calls things to the Windows operating system that define how the consul's look.

  • But you shouldn't let that put you off.

  • If you're a limit to a Mac user, the algorithm is still going to be platform independent Now for my maze algorithm.

  • I know that it's fundamentally Stack based, so I'm going to include this stack from the Standard Library and in the game class.

  • I'm going to create some variables that define the maze.

  • Specifically, my maze has a width ah, height, and I'm going to create an array here dynamically, which stores a value for all the cells, and I'm going to use this value to tell me which neighbors the cell is connected to.

  • And so to make this a little bit more readable, I'm going to create on enumeration here, where I'm defining some constants.

  • So for any given cell, I can tell whether it's connected to its neighbors because the inter value that represents that cell will contain the bit set in the appropriate locations.

  • And if I visited the cell as well, I know that the algorithm also requires me to keep track of how many cells have already visited.

  • And finally, of course, I'm going to need this stack, and this might use something a bit new to the one long code of videos I'm using.

  • The pair type A pair allows you to store two things at the same time.

  • I could create a structure here myself that stores an X and A Y corners, but I'm going to use the pair anyway.

  • Why not?

  • It's 60.

  • And so I have a stack that stores an object which type pair, but the pair is a template ID to store to introduce.

  • The 1st 1 will be the X coordinate on the 2nd 1 will be the Y coordinates.

  • Now I'm ready to specify some parameters that define my maze, someone to set the width of the maze to 40 on the heights to 25.

  • I've already pre determined that this dimension looks quite nice on the screen.

  • And because I'm I want to play with these numbers later, I'm going to allocate the maze memory dynamically based on the dimensions we've just set.

  • It's also quite important that we set all of the elements in the Meseret to zero to begin with.

  • I'm using the memo set command for this.

  • No need to specify the starting conditions for my maze.

  • The stock has to have something in it to begin with.

  • So I'm going to push on to that, a new pair and I'm going to use the make pair function.

  • We're going to start like I did when I was drawing it by hand in the top left hand corner, which means I also have to set that cell to be visited and conveniently the top left corner off.

  • My Meseret also happens to have the index zero.

  • I'm going to use one of the bits that I sat before on because I've already visited one cell I'm going to set my visited cell count 21 As you can see, there is very little required to initialize this algorithm, but it's important either.

  • Before we get stuck in with the algorithm.

  • I think it's quite important we have a way to visualize it that way.

  • We know if we're coding it in the right direction.

  • So to begin with on the unused update function, I'm going to clear the screen.

  • And that's involved, basically drawing space to my console in all locations that screen width and screen height from the top left corner.

  • And as discussed previously, Mei Mei's consists of a two D array off cells.

  • So I'm going to it straight through each of the cells makes with inmates height and for each cell in the array, I'm going to check.

  • Does the interview half the cell visited?

  • Bit set?

  • In which case, if it does, we draw a white pixel or a white block character to that location on the council or with your blue one.

  • Let's just have a quick look what that looks like.

  • Well, it's a blue rectangle with a tiny little white dots.

  • That's good.

  • I mean, that indicates that our maze off the dimensions 40 by 25 does have 40 blue characters by 25 blue characters, and the one cell we've already set to visited in the top left has been set.

  • However, everything looks a bit small and there's a problem.

  • We don't have anywhere to draw the walls.

  • I'm going to introduce the notion of a path wit, which will specify how many onscreen consul character cels represent a single cell in my maze.

  • So, for example, if the width is set to actually occupy a two by two block off cells on the console, which represents one cell in my maze, then I can surround the two sides to the east and the south off that one cell with blocks that represent wall.

  • Here's my two by two cell Here is a two by two cell, and here is a two by two cell, and we've now got position to at walls.

  • I only need to concern myself with walls at the east and south side off the cells, because if two cells are linked, then this cell loses its western wall.

  • In this cell, loses eastern wall.

  • AII the wall is shared between them and of course.

  • The same applies for north and South, so this is now cell position 00 on this would become sell 10 on this one would be 01 on 11 But the relationship to the council characters underneath is now the cell coordinate times two to get us to hear, and we always plus one to give us some wall at the end.

  • And, of course, that happens in both access so we can consider then a whole complete cell with walls and exits, and everything else is a multiple of path width plus one.

  • It's not another variable to our class.

  • Pathways on will define this as being three, so our may sell will represent three council characters across on one for the wall.

  • We then need to modify our drawing algorithm to accept this change in scale, so every position becomes multiplied by path wit plus one.

  • Let's take a look.

  • Well, we can now see that it spread out across the whole console, which is good, but it's not filled in the individual cells, which is bad.

  • Therefore, I need an additional loop inside my maze Li pin that's draws in each cell so for each cell in my maze.

  • I'm not going to go through each cell in the consul for the path width.

  • We just have to add this on to the end.

  • Take a look.

  • Excellent.

  • We now have cells which are three by three, with a wall of one on our council.

  • Great.

  • We're also going to need to draw in our pathways to overwrite the wall so we can show the cells are connected.

  • So if any of our cells have the path to east or path to south set, we also want to draw those in a cz.

  • Well, because our walls are always only one character thick.

  • I don't need to do a two dimensional plot this time and get away with a single dimensional one.

  • So I'm just going to go through the path with one at the time.

  • And the first thing I want to do is check.

  • Well, does the cell in this case does it have a south path?

  • And if it does, I want to draw in the cells to give us that passageway from the north cell to the south cell, all from the south, sell to the north cell.

  • Who knows, and we'll do the same for east to West.

  • If the cell has a passage from the east to the west in either direction, we want to overwrite the wall, the black cells in the background, on the console.

  • We want to draw them in with path color, which is white.

  • Now.

  • We've got a way to visualize the maze.

  • Let's get stuck into the really fun stuff.

  • Let's actually create it.

  • The mayor's creation could also go in the on use update function, and we want to create Maze only if the number visited cells is less than the width times the height.

  • I we can only do more May's development if there are any cells that we haven't visited.

  • Step one is to create a set of the unvisited neighbors.

  • Let's consider the North neighbor first.

  • As we're working with two DEA raise, we don't want to go out of bounds and cause all sorts of memory areas, so it's important that we don't check for neighbors.

  • The directive bounds about maze, and if we're checking for northern neighbors, that means we shouldn't be checking for any If we're currently on the top row of our mates because they just don't exist.

  • There aren't any northern neighbors, so that's the first thing I'm going to check for.

  • And to do that, I'm going to take our stack.

  • I'm going to look at the element that's at the top of the stack using the top function, and I'm going to check because the snack contains pairs.

  • I'm going to check the second element of that pair, which, if you remember, is our Y coordinate, and I'm going to ensure that is greater than zero.

  • Now we're trying to develop a list of all the neighbors that haven't been visited, so we need to check that in our Meseret.

  • And to do this, we need to get the index Now.

  • We're currently using the stack, and it's using a pair of second and first for Wine X, and so that looks something like this, which you can see is built a bit of a mouthful when we want to see how's the cell visited Flag bit been set, which will do by checking if it's equal to one, but this isn't very useful to us.

  • A tall in fact, very difficult to read.

  • Andi y coordinate in this case, would get replaced with minus one because we're checking for the neighbor above others in our Y axis onder, the X coordinate gets set to zero because we're checking in just in vertically.

  • We're not bothered about the east to west.

  • So in the event of us being in a valid location in the array on DDE that our neighbor to the north of us exists and hasn't been visited, we want to store this, and I'm going to do this by creating a vector with the vector I'm going to push to its and identify.

  • And in this case, I'm going to use zero that will say that my northern neighbor exists on dhe is unvisited.

  • I can use similar code to check for my eastern neighbor, which in this case I'm going to use one as the identify.

  • But here, I don't want to check for minus one.

  • I want to check for zero in the Y axis on dhe, plus one in the are you know what?

  • This is actually getting too much.

  • I've just gotten to the point where I could barely understand my own coat.

  • So I'm going to create a little lambda function to help me out.

  • Lambda Functions going to take an X and A Y coordinate and do this horrible little bit of offsetting for me.

  • Let's change that to an ex and change that to a why and semi colon get rid of this.

  • Now I'll just call my Lambda function, so I'm checking in the northern direction.

  • I know I'm not bothered about X, but I'm looking at minus one in the Why That's much, much Tidier.

  • And I can also do the same for my eastern function, which in this case I'm looking along the X axis by one.

  • But I'm not looking in the Y axis it all.

  • Now you might be thinking, Why don't I just do this with a macro?

  • Well, of course, you could do this with a macro, but the language now provides the auto feature quite like this.

  • I like the land of function approach to doing this.

  • It means are forced to put the code where it's needed.

  • Macron's could be any worth on the little bit.

  • Unregulated.

  • They can get a bit dangerous and deadly will also exploit the fact that the if statement is checked in order so we can get rid of this secondary call to if, which makes that line of code much more concise.

  • Now I'm going to repeat that for the other directions on here.

  • We can see.

  • I've got now an idea of zero for north, one for east to for South and three for west.

  • You'll notice with the East and West neighbors.

  • I'm not using the Y components off the vector to check whether I'm in bounds.

  • Not I'm using the X, which is the first of the pair.

  • I've just flagged a little error here.

  • I'm not actually checking if the cell is visited.

  • Of course, I am checking if the cell is not visited, so I want to make sure that that is a zero and not a one.

  • My apologies.

  • So now I have a vector that contains only valid neighbors that I could visit which I might not have any at all.

  • So I need to check for that.

  • If I don't have any, then I'm going to be popping off the stack of you remember the algorithm before.

  • But let's for now assume that I do have some neighbors.

  • The nice thing about bundling things into a vector this way is it makes other operations easier, so I want to choose a neighbor at random will to do this.

  • All I need to do is randomly choose a number from the neighbors size and use that as the index.

  • So I can get something that tells me what direction is my neighbor now.

  • And because I've been pushing 012 and three, I know from this identify which way to go next.

  • That's the value that gets stored into the next cell direction variable.

  • The algorithm says that once I've chosen a neighbor, then need to create a path between the neighbor on the cell and I'm currently in.

  • Well, now that I know both of those cells, I'm just going to use a little switch block here and fill in the blanks.

  • So let's assume the neighbors north.

  • I want to create a path to the north.

  • So my current cell, which is locally represented by 00 here because remember, this lambda function uses this stack toe workout where this it it always used at the top of the stack, and all of the coordinates are relative to the location at the top of the stack.

  • So if there's a path to the north, I'm going to or it with the path of the north bit.

  • Whilst I'm here, I may as well tell the cell that's above me.

  • I am I northern neighbor that the one below it has a path to the south and then going to push to the top of my stack.

  • The Northern Neighbors coordinates.

  • So as I pushed to the stack, I create a new pair.

  • The X coordinate is the current top of the stacks X coordinate plus zero, and the Y coordinate is the current top of the stacks.

  • Second part minus one.

  • So this is the Y.

  • Coordinate minus one of the northern neighbor.

  • If any of this switch block executes, it assumes that I have now entered that new cell.

  • So I need to increase my visited cell count, and I also need to make the cell that I am currently in.

  • So the one that's now the top of the stack, which is the new cell, which I can index with 00 Now I need to tell that sell that I have been visited so I'll just put in new cell.

  • Here is a bit of a reminder.

  • Let's duplicate this code for the other options.

  • So for South, instead of checking for minus one, we're now checking for plus one and, of course, the southern neighbor.

  • We set the northern path, and we set our current path to self.

  • Let's not also forget the coordinates of the new cell.

  • So all of this was on the condition that we had some neighbors that we haven't visited.

  • What if we didn't have any neighbors?

  • Well, if you remember from the algorithm before, we need to backtrack on because we're using a stack that's really, really complicated, don't.

  • So let's take a look and see what happens.

  • Well, I think that's fantastic.

  • We've got a really large and complex maze and labyrinth.

  • It's really nice.

  • I'm going to slow down the algorithm by adding an artificial delay.

  • Remember, this is just for visual ization.

  • It's It's not that important that we're breaking some rules here, so I'm going to use the sleep for function to delay for 10 milliseconds in each of our own user Update calls.

  • This means we'll have a maximum of 100 cell updates per second.

  • I will live in the program to run it about 100 frames per second.

  • Let's have a look.

  • The algorithm is really pleasant to watch.

  • We can see the choice to draw the longest path that it possibly can until it boxes itself in, and then it backtracks.

  • To illustrate this, I've also got it to draw the top of the stack with a green rectangle.

  • In many respects, this is similar to a flood fill algorithm will probably definitely have a look at those in the future.

  • So there you have it, a quick look at a very simple May's generation album of them.

  • There are many other algorithms for generating mazes, particularly one mazes with a set of properties such as long corridors or extra rooms.

  • But you can always use this.

  • One is a starting point.

  • For example, you could proceed some of the cells as being already visited.

  • Now, I appreciate that this video hasn't been a simplest.

  • Some of my others on this is going to happen from time to time.

  • Sometimes the topics are quite complicated and need me to use more advanced coding techniques that perhaps you've seen some of my other videos.

  • I'm still unsure yet about using something like the one lone code, a games console engine in the background.

  • I don't know if it does actually accelerate the development of the code of the video, but I've got some other ideas for it for other projects which require things to be a bit more graphical.

  • And I'm trying to avoid needing to develop a Windows application anyway, As usual, the code's gonna be available on Get Hope you can download it.

  • Hack it generates amazes for me.

  • If you've enjoyed this, give us a thumbs up.

  • It does great wonders for my self esteem on dhe.

  • Please think about subscribing.

  • Lots of people have been subscribing recently, and I'm really grateful for some of the fantastic comments that people have been leaving.

  • So please keep a lot of I'll see you next time.

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