MazeWorld.

From: hiebeler@santafe.edu
Date: Wed Mar 24 1993 - 08:42:23 UTC


> Date:         Mon, 22 Mar 93 00:46:03 MEX
> From: "Harold V. McIntosh" <MCINTOSH@unamvm1.dgsca.unam.mx>
> 
> There is a variant on this theme which might be called 'MazeWorld'
> which is also two dimensional. Most cells are either background, and
> never change, or define the layout; these can be modified slightly
> to follow progress through the maze. Finally there are entrance and
> exit cells.

  A couple of years ago, I wrote a simple rule on the CAM-PC which
solved mazes; it was basically a parallel tree search, where there was
an "active" cell at the entrance, and any hallway-cell next to the
active cell became active.  Dead-ends produced a "death" cell which
would erase the trail back to the most recent branch.  When you let it
run, the thing would fan out down the hallways but erase dead-ends,
leaving you with a marked trail from the entrance to the exit.  There
were some kinds of mazes which it wouldn't solve, but I forget just
which kinds (or at least there were "messy" mazes which would cause
some bad trails to not get erased).

> It is probably harder to prepare good, large, intricate mazes than
> it is to write the rules for this automaton. One way to generate
> mazes is to let one of the growth-type rules produce something, then
> switch over to the maze runner.

  That's for sure, generating the mazes was a real pain.  I never came
up with a good CA rule for automatically generating them,
unfortunately.

--
Dave Hiebeler
Santa Fe Institute, and Thinking Machines Corporation
hiebeler@santafe.edu, hiebeler@think.com


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Tue Oct 14 2003 - 21:44:10 UTC