Maze Boy

This app presents a maze grid that you can interact with by dragging through walls to open and close them.

While modifying the maze by tearing down and bringing up the walls — instead of moving a token — you rewrite the maze. By sweeping to open and close walls, you can watch in real time how each tiny change ripples through all three solvers in real time.

Imagine two “explorers” (left-hand and right-hand Trémaux solvers) painting the grid in red and green as they solve the maze the way Charles Pierre Trémaux would do. At each step as they trace the grid, cells turn red, green and yellow to indicate whether each cell is on the left-hand, right-hand or both Trémaux explorers’ solution. That is, only if the maze is solvable at all. If not, the whole maze just remains a dull gray.

In addition, a thin white line through the maze shows a path computed using a different algorithm (Breadth-first search). If the maze is solvable at any point in time while you are dragging through the cells, this is the truly shortest path through the maze.