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More Methods for Cube Mazes

Explore advanced methods for managing adjacency and boundary cases in cube mazes. Learn to implement wrapping techniques that map cell coordinates across cube faces, and discover how to render and outline cube mazes for visualization and folding. This lesson deepens your understanding of 3D maze structures and prepares you to solve complex maze traversal challenges on cubes.

We'll cover the following...

The CubeGrid class: A few more methods

Once we have that much, we reach the hardest part: determining cell adjacency. Specifically, we need to identify which cells are adjacent to which cells at the boundaries, and there are some remarkable edge cases here. We’ll set the basics up in the configure_cells and [] methods, like this:

Ruby
def configure_cells 
  each_cell do |cell|
    face, row, column = cell.face, cell.row, cell.column
    cell.west  = self[face, row, column-1]
    cell.east  = self[face, row, column+1]
    cell.north = self[face, row-1, column]
    cell.south = self[face, row+1, column]
  end 
end

The [] method

Ruby 3.1.2
  def [](face, row, column)
    return nil if face < 0 || face >= 6
    face, row, column = wrap(face, row, column)
    @grid[face][row][column]
  end

This should all look rather familiar, with the exception of the highlighted line in the array accessor method.

We’re going to add a new method, wrap, which takes the given face/row/column triple and—if the row or column overflows the face it’s on—figures out what the actual coordinates are on the face to which they’ve overflowed. This will allow the configure_cells method (discussed previously) to work as intended, where it simply adds or subtracts one from the row or column to get the correct neighbor, even if it extends to an adjacent face.

This is where the edge cases come in, but they aren’t all bad. Let’s start with an easy one. Consider our ...