Thanks for the explanation. what would the impact be if they had a different seed, would the maze be really drastically different? Or could it look more like the 2 mazes in the original post, with only a few walls different and mostly identical?
It depends on the pseudorandom number generator that you're using, but you'd be hard pressed to find a standard library prng where similar seeds produced similar random numbers. That would be pretty bad design.
For example, here is some code I wrote to test my own prng:
srand(1000000);
for( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ )
printf( "%d\n", rand() );
printf("====\n");
srand(1000001);
for( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ )
printf( "%d\n", rand() );
I'm aware of how prngs work, and of how often they are misused. What I was mostly wondering was how big an effect that would give in the final product. Do typical maze generation algorithms use it extensively, or sparingly so the differences are minor? How different would the maze look if the seed was different, and is it likely that you could get very similar mazes from completely different seeds?
I think the short answer is that the maze will look very different. It's very possible that the verts of the maze would be in exactly the same position, since that's a regular pattern. But the maze walls will be extremely random.
