Add MazeGenerator exercise and related tests

[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

[rabestro]

I just realized that the latest pull request contains a new version of the JUnit library. Should I use JUnit 5 for the new exercise?

[sanderploegsma]

Thanks for your contribution! This sounds like a fun and challenging exercise.

I left some inline comments for you to look at. Apart from those, these points should be addressed before this can be merged:

• The exercise should be added to the config.json at the root of this repository. This is where the exercises are sourced from on exercism.org, so it won't be available to anyone unless it's in there.
• The exercise's Gradle project should be added to exercises/settings.gradle. This will include it in the CI build as well.
• Depending on whether Add Mazy Mice Exercise to the Repository problem-specifications#2312 is merged before this, I suggest adding .meta/tests.toml as described in the documentation: https://exercism.org/docs/building/configlet/sync#h-tests

[sanderploegsma]

I just realized that the latest pull request contains a new version of the JUnit library. Should I use JUnit 5 for the new exercise?

Support for JUnit 5 is being added in exercism/java-test-runner#61. It will support both JUnit 4 and 5 so for now I would suggest to keep using JUnit 4 like the other practice exercises.

[rabestro]

* [X]  The exercise's Gradle project should be added to `exercises/settings.gradle`. This will include it in the CI build as well.

done

[rabestro]

• The exercise should be added to the config.json at the root of this repository. This is where the exercises are sourced from on exercism.org, so it won't be available to anyone unless it's in there.

done

[sanderploegsma]

@rabestro are you still actively working on this?

[rabestro]

@rabestro are you still actively working on this?

Yes. I'm on vocation now and I will continue in November.

[sanderploegsma]

Thanks for taking care of everything! I will need a moment to review it, I hope to get to it in the coming week. Just know that it’s on my to-do list! 🙂

[sanderploegsma]

Thanks for processing the comments! I have found some more things to address though, could you have a look at them?

[sanderploegsma]

Awesome work! I think this would make a great addition to the Java track.

Can I ask you to add one more thing before we merge? Since this exercise is new on Exercism, I'd like to mark it as beta so that students on the website are asked to provide feedback on it. You can do this by adding the property "status": "beta" to the exercise object in the config.json at the root of this repo.

[rabestro]

Since this exercise is new on Exercism, I'd like to mark it as beta so that students on the website are asked to provide feedback on it. You can do this by adding the property "status": "beta" to the exercise object in the config.json at the root of this repo.

done