How Maze Generators Work: Maze Algorithms Explained

A maze generator is just an algorithm for deciding which walls in a grid to remove. The choice of algorithm changes how the finished maze feels — long winding corridors versus lots of short branches. Here's how the main ones work.

Recursive backtracker (depth-first search)

This is the algorithm MazeWalker uses, and the most popular for good reason. Start at a cell, then repeatedly walk into a random unvisited neighbor, carving the wall between. When you hit a dead end, back up to the most recent cell with an unvisited neighbor and carry on. The "backtracking" is just popping cells off a stack. The result has long, twisty corridors and a strong sense of a single main path — exactly what makes a maze fun to walk. See it applied in how to make a maze.

Perfect mazes

Because the recursive backtracker only ever tunnels into unvisited cells, it produces a perfect maze: every cell is reachable, and there's exactly one path between any two cells — no loops, no isolated regions. That property is what guarantees the maze is always solvable, and what lets the wall-follower rule work every time.

Other maze algorithms

• Prim's / Kruskal's. Grow the maze from many fronts at once; these produce more uniform, branchy mazes with shorter dead ends.
• Wilson's. Uses random walks to generate a perfectly unbiased maze, at the cost of speed.
• Binary tree / sideways. Extremely fast but visibly biased toward two directions — easy to spot.

Try it yourself

The fastest way to get a feel for this is to generate a few mazes at different sizes and look at the patterns. The corridors, the density of dead ends, the length of the solution — all of it comes from the algorithm.

Frequently asked questions

What algorithm is used to generate mazes?

The most common is the recursive backtracker, a depth-first search that carves passages and backtracks at dead ends. Other algorithms include Prim's, Kruskal's, and Wilson's, each producing a different 'texture' of maze.