Exercise: Mazy Mice

[rabestro]

Introduction

Meet Mickey and Minerva, two clever mice who love to navigate their way through a maze to find cheese. They enjoy a good challenge, but with only their tiny mouse brains, they prefer if there's only one correct path to the cheese.

Instructions

Your task is to generate the perfect mazes for Mickey and Minerva — those with only one solution and no isolated sections. Here's what you need to know:

• The maze is rectangular, with the outer borders roughly forming a rectangle.
• The maze has square cells and orthogonal passages intersecting at right angles.
• The program should accept two parameters: rows and columns. The maze should be between 5 and 100 cells in size.
• Consider the maze walls by using the formula 2x+1 for the actual width and height, where x is rows or columns.
• If no seed is provided, generate a random maze. If a seed is provided, get the same labyrinth every time.
• Use box-drawing characters to draw walls, and an arrow symbol (⇨) for the entrance on the left and exit on the right.

It's time to create some perfect mazes for these adventurous mice!

Examples

1. The smallest square maze 5x5 cells (or 11x11 characters)

	┌───────┬─┐
	│       │ │
	│ ┌─┬── │ │
	│ │ │   │ ⇨
	│ │ │ ──┤ │
	⇨ │ │   │ │
	┌─┤ └── │ │
	│ │     │ │
	│ │ ────┘ │
	│         │
	└─────────┘

2. The rectangular maze 6x18 cells

	┌───────────┬─────────┬───────────┬─┐
	│           │         │           │ │
	│ ┌───────┐ │ ┌─┐ ──┐ └───┐ ┌───┐ │ │
	│ │       │ │ │ │   │     │ │   │   ⇨
	│ └─┐ ┌─┐ │ │ │ ├── ├───┐ │ │ ──┼── │
	│   │ │ │   │   │   │   │ │ │   │   │
	└── │ │ ├───┴───┤ ┌─┘ ┌─┘ │ ├── │ ──┤
	⇨   │   │       │ │   │   │ │   │   │
	┌─┬─┴─┐ └─┐ ┌─┐ │ └─┐ │ ┌─┘ │ ──┴─┐ │
	│ │   │   │ │ │ │   │   │   │     │ │
	│ │ │ └── │ │ │ └── │ ──┘ ┌─┘ ──┐ │ │
	│   │       │       │     │     │   │
	└───┴───────┴───────┴─────┴─────┴───┘

Hints

General

• The rand numeric function can generate random numbers.
• The srand numeric function will be helpful to set the seed for rand.

Maze generation

You can use any algorithm to generate a perfect maze. The recursive backtracker is a good choice.

Box drawing characters

Character	Name	Unicode
┌	box drawings light down and right	U+250C
─	box drawings light horizontal	U+2500
┬	box drawings light down and horizontal	U+252C
┐	box drawings light down and left	U+2510
│	box drawings light vertical	U+2502
└	box drawings light up and right	U+2514
┴	box drawings light up and horizontal	U+2534
┘	box drawings light up and left	U+2518
├	box drawings light vertical and right	U+2520
⇨	rightwards white arrow	U+21E8

[iHiD]

Thanks! :)

FYI, @glennj will probably want to review this, and he's away on holiday for the next two weeks.

(Also cc @ErikSchierboom)

[ErikSchierboom]

I can't comment on the AWK code, but I've left some general comments.

You'll also want to address the configlet lint error: https://github.com/exercism/awk/actions/runs/5849278159/job/15857441904?pr=211

[ErikSchierboom]

https://exercism.org/docs/building/tracks/practice-exercises can be helpful

[glennj]

This is an impressive achievement. I imagine at some point it will be adopted into problem-specifications for other tracks to implement. After merging we'll track its success rate in https://exercism.org/tracks/awk/build

Specific changes needed:

• add the exercise to the track config.json, at the end of the .exercises.practice array.
  • This is a "hard" exercise, please use difficulty 8
  • generate a UUID with ./bin/configlet uuid
• Please create a .docs/hints.md file containing perhaps links to articles on how to implement the algorithm.
  • I would have a hard time implementing this.
  • this hints.md file creates a HINTS.md file for CLI users: the variable-length-quantity exercise has one. I'm not sure where it shows up in the web editor.
• every exercise needs bats-extra.bash -- copy it from another exercise.
• do we want to expose the awk maze tester to the web editor?
  • Students might want to understand the validate_maze function in the bats test suite
  • If yes, then in .meta/config.json add "editor": ["test-maze.awk"] to the .files object.
• before submitting again, run ./bin/configlet lint and ./bin/configlet fmt -e mazy-mice

[rabestro]

• add the exercise to the track config.json, at the end of the .exercises.practice array.
• This is a "hard" exercise, please use difficulty 8
• generate a UUID with ./bin/configlet uuid
• Please create a .docs/hints.md file containing perhaps links to articles on how to implement the algorithm.
• every exercise needs bats-extra.bash -- copy it from another exercise.
• If yes, then in .meta/config.json add "editor": ["test-maze.awk"] to the .files object.
• before submitting again, run ./bin/configlet lint and ./bin/configlet fmt -e mazy-mice

[rabestro]

https://exercism.org/docs/building/tracks/practice-exercises can be helpful

Thank you for the link. I need some time to learn it :)

[ErikSchierboom]

@rabestro I'll let @IsaacG and @glennj handle the further reviewing of this PR

[rabestro]

Hi @glennj , @IsaacG.
I hope that I have resolved all the comments.

[glennj]

@IsaacG did you want another look at this?

[IsaacG]

Looks good! Thanks for doing this. I have some minor word-smithing suggestions.

[rabestro]

Looks good! Thanks for doing this. I have some minor word-smithing suggestions.

fixed

[glennj]

A couple of comments. No changes strictly required.

[glennj]

Many thanks for persevering @rabestro!