[bigDinosaur]

That's a fair point, and for many students true, but also not what I was claiming which is simply that these techniques are usually taught. If students fail to learn or have no interest or cram and forget, that's another problem.

That said, it's not like I was taught the specifics of generating mazes, even though there was additional content on it in the textbook etc. - I'm talking more about the general algorithms.

[kragen]

Maze generation is sometimes used in CS classes as an example of data structures like union-find or algorithms like minimum spanning tree construction; http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c31/notes/ch07.pdf is one example. It wouldn't be terribly surprising for someone to get through an undergraduate CS curriculum without encountering maze generation, which is kind of a shame, and though hopefully they do encounter minimum spanning trees at least a few times, their application to maze generation may be nonobvious. And Mike has visualized a number of other maze generation algorithms here that are more specialized.

But I was saying that when guessmyname said, "programmers who went through college and/or university didn’t learn this stuff there," they're probably mostly correct, regardless of whether this stuff was taught, because most programmers who went through college and/or university were mostly focused on getting good grades, not learning, and you don't need to learn this stuff to get good grades. So your response that it was taught is not entirely to the point.

[bigDinosaur]

I don't think we really disagree all that much.