Understanding Biases

Biases in an algorithm

It’s easy to say, “This algorithm has a bias” and “That algorithm has no bias,” but so far, we haven’t been very specific about what we mean by that. It’s more than simply identifying a long passage or a slantwise tendency in a maze. A visible texture or pattern in a maze—in the output of an algorithm—is only evidence of an algorithm’s bias if a significant number of mazes generated by that algorithm exhibit that same texture.

But even that definition doesn’t really cover it. Unlike Sidewinder and Binary Tree, biases may not always be blatantly obvious. They may not even produce visible artifacts at all. To understand how that can be, let’s consider an example.

Can’t mazes have biases, too?

Walter Pullen uses the ...