Coloring Our Mazes

Introducing colors to our grids

It turns out that coloring mazes in a particular way acts like an X-ray machine, letting us peer inside and get a much clearer view of the structure of a maze and the algorithm that generated it. Dijkstra’s algorithm is ideal for this because of the matrix of numbers it generates. Every cell with the same distance value has one thing in common: they all are equidistant from the starting cell. This just needs a paint-by-number exercise.

The easiest way to do this is to treat each number ...