I was given a hand-drawn maze that is called the Doom Mazes. It’s a very simple maze. There is one entrance and one exit to the maze. The creator of the maze has given me the challenge of getting from the entrance to the exit of the maze using only left, right, forward and backward movements, while working against a ticking clock (which I think starts at 30 seconds).
Trying to get through these mazes requires a great deal of thinking and reasoning. The mazes are also very difficult; it took me several tries to get through some of them, and I am quite good at this type of game. This makes them entertaining games for children or adults; they keep you engaged in thinking about how you’re going to solve them.
There are many mazes on the Doom Mazes blog. Some are easier than others, but all require some thought to get through them in the allotted time. And all are interesting to look at and examine in order to determine how you would go about solving them if you had more time.*
Doom Mazes are a subcategory of mazes where the maze itself is the point. The player doesn’t try to get through them; instead, they look at them.
Some mazes are very famous, like the ones on the floor of Chartres Cathedral (see figure 1), or the maze in Hampton Court Palace in London.
Other mazes are modern and abstract, like those created by M. C. Escher: see (figure 2). Some are two-dimensional mazes on paper or computer screens; some are three-dimensional mazes made of plastic. The 3-D ones can be made using nets and modular forms — for example, a set of five interlocking tetrahedrons is a five-way intersection, so five tetrahedrons would make a cube with one open side. Or they can be made from string — one way to make a labyrinth is to take a sheet of paper and crumple it up randomly into a ball shape, then unfold it without disturbing the creases too much, and lay string across each crease to make a net that defines the passages of the maze.
There’s also a kind of video game called “Maze Games” where you play inside a maze rather than looking at
A maze is a single-player logical puzzle, in which the player must find a route from the start of the maze to the end by moving through its twists and turns. Mazes are as old as civilization itself, and their origin may be lost in prehistory. The word “maze” comes from Old French, but the word mazir, meaning “to get lost,” comes from an ancient Germanic root, suggesting that mazes were invented before written language.
Toward the end of the 19th century, mazes began to appear in puzzle books, although they had always been a feature of games played on paper. Maze games are closely related to such classic puzzles as Sudoku and crosswords; indeed, crosswords are basically mazes with all but one path blocked off at the beginning.
The concept of Doom Mazes came from an online discussion forum dedicated to maze games. A member suggested that other members use Doom textures to create new types of maze puzzles. The idea was enthusiastically embraced by many others who had also created their own Doom-based maze games or who had used Doom maps for this purpose in the past.
The Maze Game, also known as the Game of the Maze, is a game with very simple rules and an infinite number of possible mazes. The rules are as follows:
1. Start at any square.
2. Move one space at a time.
3. Take every third step (counting both forward and backward) to turn 90 degrees in either direction.
4. If you ever reach a dead end, back up and take another path to get out of the dead end. If you can’t find another path, then go back to the beginning and try another route to get out of the maze.
5. Keep going until you get to the exit or give up.*
The only difference between this version of the Maze Game and most versions is that this version has dead ends, while many other versions don’t have dead ends or have them less often.* This makes some mazes easier and some harder — it’s more like exploring a real maze than a typical puzzle — but it also allows you to create mazes that no one else has ever seen before.* And if you get bored with regular mazes, try adding walls (some mazes without walls do exist but are somewhat harder). Or try making the walls and floor different colors, which
First, a word about terminology. The word “art” has many uses. There’s art that is entertaining but not very deep, like most movies and novels. There’s art that is deep but not very entertaining, like some movies and novels. And then there’s art that is both deep and entertaining, like some movies and novels. In this post I use the word “art” in this third sense, to mean works of visual or written expression that are simultaneously meaningful and enjoyable.
Turing was interested in how computers could create interesting patterns without being specifically programmed to do so. He was also interested in how people can create interesting patterns without being specifically programmed to do so. Specifically, he was interested in how people could create interesting patterns without being aware of it themselves.
The idea behind the Maze Game is that you create a maze by making choices at each fork in the road (the place where the maze branches into two paths). You make a choice completely at random, with equal probability for each of the two choices at each fork. If you’re right often enough–that is, if you happen upon dead ends less often than paths to other dead ends–you will eventually find a way out of the maze by sheer luck. If not, your only option is
Mazes are an ancient and popular form of art. In the Middle Ages, Jesus was often represented in paintings as exiting from a maze or entering into a maze. The most famous example is in the Cathedral at Chartres, where Christ is shown very roughly in the shape of a man.
The word “maze” comes from the Old Norse word “maz,” which means “dungeon.” Mazes were originally designed to be confusing prisons for prisoners. They were also used as dungeons themselves, where people were put to die after being tortured. Today, mazes are just fun games (and sometimes art).
Trapezoids are another ancient form of art. They’re quite different from mazes, though they may look similar to some people. We will say more about them later in this essay, but for now it’s enough to know that they are not mazes.
Mazes and trapezoids both have many interesting properties from the point of view of mathematics and computer science. This essay gives you a chance to discover some of these properties for yourself.*