mazes are generated using prim's algorithm, but only because it was convenient/easy to implement - the resulting mazes are maybe a bit too simple. at a high level, we recursively pick pairs containing of a passage and its neighbors, and if the neighbor is a wall, we turn it and the cell in between into a passage. either way, we add this new neighbor to the recursive 'stack'.

the solvers are all generators yielding the current cell and the path the solver has taken to get there, rather than just completing and returning a list of cells corresponding to the solved path. this allows me to generate 'frames' of what the solver has visited throughout each iteration and the current longest path its found.

the animation is done in a really silly way, using async js to update CSS rules to color cells. i had previously planned to use something like matplotlib's animation library to generate + store the animations and then serve them to the user, but it was incredibly slow and the files were huge - i had an idea to just try to do it all in js/css and was impressed by how much faster it was. each frame is just a list of cells with some magic numbers indicating how they should be colored, which means it is pretty lightweight (at least in comparison) to send them to the web client. a huge improvement in the amount of transferred data could be made by just using an index for each cell rather than its coordinates and also only sending the differences between each frame, but this shifts some of the work to the browser (which would probably be better).