I just got it -- thanks for sharing this! Could watch it for hours...
If anyone else wants to download the screensaver, you can get it for linux/osx/ios/android: https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ . Most in the collection aren't great (unless you're in an early-2000s aesthetic mood), but I just installed the substrate one :)
Ach! this reminds me of an artist who worked mostly with Processing ( https://processing.org ) and either did this or something very like it (and a bunch of other stuff.)
Being able to see the random seed used in the console and use it in the hash is a nice touch. I found a few large ones and one with a single path between two points (1592751582695)
I feel I'm missing something when people ask what algorithm this is using. I'm imagining it as a bunch of Math.random and If statements. In fact, I don't think I've ever googled for a specific algorithm or implemented one. Am I doing programming wrong?
Not really, I've no experience with e-ink displays, if I was to do it, I'd hunt for an older-generation large-size e-book reader and try to hack the firmware a bit.
I have two Kobo readers that are 5+ years old, the small one, I cracked open and found that the Linux OS was on a normal SD card in a normal socket, so I removed it and flashed it to a bigger card, I think one of those should be easy(ish) to hack :)
1. I define a set of possible moves (eg. straight ahead, left turn, junction, etc). One possible move is a dead-end, which looks a bit like a house in my interpretation.
2. Each move is assigned a relative weight (eg. continuing straight ahead 10x more likely than turning left).
3. Each iteration, for each of the roads under construction, a random move is selected. Some moves are impossible (based on other roads already drawn on the map) and so it will ensure not to select one that would result in a collision. At worst, it will terminate the road with a dead-end.
4. Repeat forever, until every road has terminated in a dead-end.
Most of the script itself is dealing with the rendering logic. To avoid collisions I maintain a 2D array of all visited points.
It is artificially limited to a 1001 x 1001 grid - just to stop it from growing forever (which could get quite slow on lower end devices). In practice I rarely encounter maps that go that far.
Thanks. It's plain JavaScript, rendering with an HTML canvas.
I did investigate JS 2D graphics libraries but decided in the end that this was sufficiently simple to not warrant one. It was harder than I expected to get the drag & zoom to work!
