[sltkr]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the site you linked is wrong too, and I think the author doesn't realize it, because he says:

> My last post was about using Kruskal’s algorithm to generate random mazes. This article is about using another minimal spanning tree algorithm to do the same: Prim’s algorithm.

But his implementation is NOT the same! (His implementation of Kruskal's algorithm does look correct.) Extracting elements at a random index is not equivalent to assigning random weights to elements and extracting the minimum-weight elements.

[mbostock]

I spoke to Jamis Buck on Twitter. It’s called “Randomized Prim’s” on Wikipedia [1], but of course Wikipedia is not authoritative. It does seem confusing to call it a variant of Prim’s given how different the behavior is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_generation_algorithm#Rando...

[sltkr]

I see -- apparently it's common to call this "Prim's algorithm" even though it is more accurately described as a randomized variant of breadth/depth-first search. Thanks for clarifying that.

I do still object to the text reading "This article is about using another minimal spanning tree algorithm to do the same" -- what is described there is not a minimal spanning tree algorithm (even if it's called Prim's algorithm).