Cylinder Mazes

Mazes for Programmers — by Jamis Buck (96 / 121)

👈 Chapter 14 Bending and Folding Your Mazes | TOC | Möbius Mazes 👉

Cylinder mazes are a good place to start, because they’re actually really, really easy. You can make a naive one simply by generating a rectangular maze, printing it out, and wrapping it around a soup can so that the ends touch, like this:

The problem with this approach is that you wind up with a seam where the maze’s east and west boundaries meet:

Is this ringing any bells? You may recall that we ran into a similar issue at the end of our discussion on circle mazes. We can solve the problem here using the same trick we used there: overriding the [] method to ensure that the column parameter wraps smoothly from one side to the other. In this way, columns on the east and west boundaries are made to think they’re actually adjacent to one another.

The entirety of our cylinder grid implementation looks like this:

We’ll do the usual drill here and make a demo program to test it:

The resulting maze will look a bit odd:

Keep in mind, though, that this maze is intended to wrap around, so the east and west edges are actually supposed to be adjacent. The dimensions here were chosen intentionally to give an aspect ratio similar to that of the label on a can of soup, so if you wanted, you could scale your image up to approximately…

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