Creating and solving mazes with Go
Programming Snapshot – Go Mazes

© Photo by Henri Lajarrige Lombard on Unsplash
Mazes fascinated even the ancient Greeks. Mike Schilli uses his Go programming skills to create a maze and then efficiently travel through it.
In Europe, mazes are said to have come into fashion during the 15th century, mostly on manorial estates where guests were politely invited to "lose themselves" in gardens segregated by high hedges. However, winding paths (some of which even lead you in circles), where you need to make it from a starting point to an endpoint, can also be drawn on paper or simulated on computers. Algorithms usually represent a maze's path system internally as a graph along the edges of which the virtual explorer traverses from one node to the next, discarding dead ends, breaking out of endless loops, and eventually arriving at the destination node.
Computational handling of mazes is divided into two tasks: creating mazes and traversing them as effectively as possible by using a solver. You wouldn't think it possible, but on Amazon you can actually find a book entitled Mazes for Programmers [1]. The Kindle version of this book is a total failure due to font problems, but the paper edition shows some useful methods for creating and solving mazes.
From Cell to Cell
A maze consists of a matrix of MxN cells. In Figure 1, red arrows show the directions in which a traveler advances from cell to cell. These options then define the walls that are drawn to separate a cell from its neighbors.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.