Maze Solver 1.2

    I made some changes to the maze solving simulator.  I found a maze from 2004 that the old one could not solve.  I tried to avoid the code, succeed, test, fail, code some more routine and come up with a new strategy.  This time, I turned off the explore counter.  The mouse is either exploring or speed running.  Each solve and return is either an explore run or a speed run. The speed run terminates the program with it gets back to the start.

Here is the latest simulator
Here is the new maze, maze 4

    Oh, I changed the text display, too.  The maze is now in red with white values.  The mouse is '800' in blue.  There is a variable called colors.  If you set it to false, it prints everything in monochrome.  I found this useful for step debugging in Pydev Eclipse.

Here is a screenshot of the mouse having explored, solved, and back solved once:

Here, you can see the most of the lower half is left unexplored.  A speed solve at this point will take a lot of side trips!  Let's explore some more:

That's better.  Now we have 217 cells of the maze explored.  Now we could do a reliable speed run.

    I'm thinking my mouse will capture the number of explored cells.  When it gets back to the start after an explore round, it will output the number of known cells on an LCD.  The operator ( me ) can elect to do another explore solve or a speed run by pressing a "speed run" button. This button could toggle between speed and explore modes.  The LCD should also display this value.  I'll want another button to vary the speed as I amp up to the best speed/time.  Perhaps the speed level should also be displayed...  We shall see.