Wilson's Algorithm

There is a whole pile of beautifully illustrated algorithms there:<p><a href="http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bl.ocks.org&#x2F;mbostock</a>

When I see mbostock&#x27;s work it reminds me of what I love about computer science and why I keep trying to learn more. Lovely stuff.

These random walks resemble voltage arcs.

Mike Bostock just showed this work last Wednesday at Eyeo Festival. It was a pure work of art.<p>The video of his talk will be posted next month to their Vimeo channel [1]; worth watching when it comes out.<p>[1] <a href="http://vimeo.com/eyeofestival" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;eyeofestival</a>

Starting in a corner seems to be a worst case choice for a random walk on a non-looped grid. I forked it to<p>a) use a random order for starting (and restarting) <a href="http://bl.ocks.org/jix/30e55ae16b99efe94bfc/ab5a84881174512a256136681424d9d6bdadb0d6" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bl.ocks.org&#x2F;jix&#x2F;30e55ae16b99efe94bfc&#x2F;ab5a84881174512a...</a> and<p>b) start from the center and always restart with the innermost free cell <a href="http://bl.ocks.org/jix/30e55ae16b99efe94bfc/aeaced224b45a4136f578a1328cf9bcd46ecb9f6" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bl.ocks.org&#x2F;jix&#x2F;30e55ae16b99efe94bfc&#x2F;aeaced224b45a413...</a>

Is there a practical use for this algorithm, or is is simply for beauty?

I was looking for a nice visual explanation showing the connection between a maze and a spanning tree. I found this visual to be useful: <a href="http://cybertron.cg.tu-berlin.de/rapid_prototyping_11ws/mazes/images/dual.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cybertron.cg.tu-berlin.de&#x2F;rapid_prototyping_11ws&#x2F;maze...</a>

The &quot;Wilson&quot; of the title is David Bruce Wilson (<a href="http://dbwilson.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dbwilson.com</a>), an accomplished mathematical probabilist, who may be familiar as a developer of perfect sampling (&quot;Propp-Wilson&quot;) for Markov chain Monte Carlo computations.

&gt; Initially, the algorithm can be frustratingly slow to watch<p>By &quot;frustratingly slow&quot;, what are we talking about? It&#x27;s been running for over an hour with no progress and my computer at work automatically reboots over the weekend. How long do I need to keep this tab open?

The color flooding visualization is <i>very</i> nice!

Bostock does it again. So awesome and detailed. Great work Mike.

can you someone edit it and make it better? <a href="http://runnable.com/U5wQt8xHLYsVkYc_/wilson%E2%80%99s-algorithm-for-d3-js-and-javascript" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;runnable.com&#x2F;U5wQt8xHLYsVkYc_&#x2F;wilson%E2%80%99s-algori...</a>