Maze

Visualize how computers solve a maze!

Description

This project is a small programming exercise that implements two classic search algorithms—recursive depth-first search (DFS) and breadth-first search (BFS)—to solve a maze.

The maze is defined in a text file (maze.txt) using these characters in a simple .txt file:

• " " for empty spaces
• "#" for walls
• "S" for the start position
• "E" for the end position

The project uses the Pygame library to visualize the search algorithms in real time as they attempt to find a solution.

Project Status & Contributions

This project is currently in a working state. Contributions, feedback, and code improvements are highly encouraged!

To contribute or provide feedback, please use GitHub's Create a Ticket feature. Alternatively, you can reach out via email.

If you'd like to contribute code, feel free to fork the repository and create a pull request with your changes.

Installation

To install and run the project, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository:

   Make sure to have Git installed.

   Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/took/maze.git
   cd maze

2. Install dependencies:

   Make sure to have Python >= 3.11 and pip installed.

   Install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Start the script:

python3 main.py

Once the program is running, a Pygame window will display the progress of the selected search algorithm (recursive depth-first and/or breadth-first search) as it navigates through the maze.

Command line parameter

You can specify options via command-line arguments, see also:

python3 main.py --help

usage: main.py [-h] [-m MAZE] [-d DELAY] [-rc RECURSION_LIMIT] [--fps FPS] [--logfile LOGFILE] [-l LOGLEVEL]
               [-v] [-vv] [-vvv]

Maze

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -m MAZE, --maze MAZE  Filename of maze to load (Default: mazes/maze.txt)
  -d DELAY, --delay DELAY
                        Delay for maze updates in milliseconds (Default: 200)
  -rc RECURSION_LIMIT, --recursion-limit RECURSION_LIMIT
                        Set python recursion limit (Default: Do not change)
  --fps FPS             Max frames per seconf (Default: 60)
  --logfile LOGFILE     Path to the log file (Default: app.log)
  -l LOGLEVEL, --loglevel LOGLEVEL
                        Log level verbosity (Default: WARNING, Recommended: DEBUG, INFO, WARNING or ERROR)
  -v, --verbose         Verbose output (Default: False)
  -vv, --very-verbose   Very verbose output (Default: False)
  -vvv, --very-very-verbose
                        Very very verbose output (Default: False)

Here is an example with a bigger maze and only 20ms delay:

python3 main.py -d 20 -m mazes/big-maze.txt

Monitor log file

You may want to monitor the application log file. You can use tail running in the background:

touch app.log
tail -f app.log &
python3 main.py --loglevel DEBUG

See also

You can use this to create more mazes: https://pypi.org/project/labyrinth-py/