A Strangely Soothing Visualization Of An Algorithm Solving A Maze

Sometimes animated data visualizations demonstrate something important and mind-blowing about the real world. Other times they just look really cool. This visualization of a maze being solved, created by redditor NevCee, falls into the latter category.

NevCee explains,

I thought generating and solving mazes seemed like a fun project and this is a visualization of the solution process of a randomly generated maze. The code is written in Python and Matplotlib is used for visualization. Code can be found at GitHub. Here is also the algorithm for generating the mazes, see example here. The generator implementation is inspired by the psuedo code on Wikipedia…

To clarify, when the searches reaches a fork it chooses the next cell which minimizes the Euclidian distance to end point.

[Reddit]

NevCee also posted a just-as-cool-looking visualization of how the maze was created, using a similar technique. This one might be even more satisfying to look at, since the algorithm eventually touches every cell in the grid. (Click the image to play the GIF):

Are you looking at these animations thinking, "I just wish they lasted longer"? Here you go.

Ahhhhhh. We could watch these all day.