DIS - Mazes.

Rowan Crawford:
>Now the "concept" behind the maze was an optical illusion, helped out
>by a simple sign.

Yup.  Most interesting corridor-type mazes are based upon some sort of
misdirection.  I was once in a small mirror maze where the path to the
exit was fairly close to the entrance, but it was angled back and the
mirrors were set so you couldn't see that turn as you go in.  But once
you backtrack to that point, the way out is fairly obvious.

Doing a paper maze is quite a different experience.  Tricks like that
don't translate well, but you can still do some misdirection.

Somewhere, I have a book with 3-d mazes of all sorts.  I forget the
title and author.  Many of those mazes tried to make it easy to
overlook the right path with visual tricks.  (Also note, you can't
apply the simple right-hand rule in a multi-level 3-d maze.)

A recent _Games_ magazine had an interesting 2-d maze.  It covered the
front and back of a page, and the paths crossed the edge of the paper,
so you had to flip back and forth.  But you were also allowed to fold
the page along a particular vertical line, any time you wanted, giving
you different connections you could take.

The mazes I find most interesting are nontraditional mazes.  I have
another book somewhere, can't remember the title/author of this one
either :(, that has nontraditional mazes of all sorts.

In one maze, you're shown a roadmap and told you have to drive your
car to the repair shop without making any left turns (your turn signal
is busted), except if you pass some certain spots in the city your
parity flips and you're not allowed to make any right turns.

In another maze, called Alice in Wonderland, you have a chessboard
grid.  Each square has arrows showing which directions you can go from
there.  Some squares are colored red or green.  You're a piece that
moves N squares in the direction of an arrow.  N starts as 1.  If you
land on a green square, N increases by 1.  If you land on a red
square, N decreases by 1.

This has drifted pretty far from ascii art.. :)
--

Felix Lee (fle...@cse.psu.edu) wrote:
> This has drifted pretty far from ascii art.. :)

Perhaps, but it's a damned sight more interesting!  :-)  Time for
alt.mazes?

phil

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