> The maze-creating algorithms might be interesting for computer scientists, but they're terrible at creating mazes interesting for humans!
Not sure what would lead you to that conclusion. There's only so much you can do with (for example) a two color palette and no lawn art but it goes without saying that there's nothing restricting an implementation to the sort of minimalist methodology that's so useful for demonstrating an algorithm for the reader.
The last time this was posted [0] someone linked this article [1] which provides a nice visual demonstration of the structural differences between a few of the algorithms (scroll down for the color floods I'm referring to). Of course this can all be implemented as a graph (ie nodes that have coordinates) rather than as a grid, empty space expanded (ie coordinates subjected to an arbitrary series of affine transformations), branches of the tree overlaid after the fact to add weave (ie rotating and translating the coordinates of subtrees), nodes expanded to represent larger areas instead of single grid cells, whatever you'd like.
Also see the modifying in blocks algorithm applied to an escheresque tileset [2] (from this article [3]) which will produce a solvable 3D maze (multi-path and multi-solution) if given an appropriate tileset.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101728 [1] https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/#maze-generation [2] https://www.boristhebrave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/esc... [3] https://www.boristhebrave.com/2021/10/26/model-synthesis-and...
The WFC/model synthesis article is very interesting, thanks.
Yes the color floods are stunning, but these are exactly the algorithms which do not produce very interesting mazes. In particular, I don't think the "no loops" is a good maze property - the loops just have to be interesting.