Beautiful! These would be very useful to someone learning these algorithms, but also to someone interested in creating their own visualizations. I like how you highlight the drawbacks of different types of visualizations and demonstrate that different visualizations can have different goals, and offer creative solutions for both.
One nitpick with the maze visualizations though. I found that the maze color flood animations have the same issue that you mentioned sorting has: animations are frustrating to watch because you have to wait and then rely on memory to recognize patterns. Specifically, I found the color scale rotation was much too fast to see large patterns, and even small patterns were too dense to be able to trace backwards after the maze had been fully colored.
I have an idea for an alternate visualization: Only show the fully colored maze (no intermediates), but vary the color rotation length over time from frame to frame. You'd be able to see color rippling through the maze and be able to follow the ripples over both large scale and small scale features.
Varying the rotation length sounds interesting and, like you suggested, could be great for seeing both micro and macro features. There was a bug previously where the Prim’s visualization rotated twice as fast, and it looked quite different!
Sorting-algorithm animations have a long history, and, when I was younger, I thought these animations were fun to watch, but I never learned anything from them. At this point in my knowledge, I wouldn't expect to learn anything from a visualization unless I had already studied the algorithm quite closely and I had a specific question I wanted to answer. Even then, it's a shot in the dark; most algorithms don't lend themselves to being visualized. The animations are very pretty, though -- who knows, maybe they will help someone.
I think sorting animations could help someone with a purely technical understanding make the jump to an intuitive understanding, but I agree, it would be a stretch to say that it could teach them the algorithm by itself.
One nitpick with the maze visualizations though. I found that the maze color flood animations have the same issue that you mentioned sorting has: animations are frustrating to watch because you have to wait and then rely on memory to recognize patterns. Specifically, I found the color scale rotation was much too fast to see large patterns, and even small patterns were too dense to be able to trace backwards after the maze had been fully colored.
I have an idea for an alternate visualization: Only show the fully colored maze (no intermediates), but vary the color rotation length over time from frame to frame. You'd be able to see color rippling through the maze and be able to follow the ripples over both large scale and small scale features.