As I said on the home page . . . these are called “Alice” mazes because they recall the scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice eats a piece of cake with the sign “Eat Me” and grows larger, then she drinks from a bottle marked “Drink Me” and becomes smaller. These mazes won’t make you larger or smaller, but the distance you travel in a move will get larger or smaller.

Rules: You start this maze on the red square, and your current position is always shown in red. You must make a series of moves that will take you to the goal. Begin each move by following one of the arrows in the red square, travel in a straight line for a distance equal to d, and then click on the square where your move ends.

When the maze begins, d equals 1. When you land on a square with a red arrow, 1 is added to d. When you land on a square with a yellow arrow, 1 is subtracted from d. Two of these mazes have blank squares, which you may not land on.

Notes: There are twenty different layouts here. The rules are based on a maze called “Alice in Mazeland” in my 1990 book Mad Mazes. When I wrote that book it never occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have several mazes with the same rules. The layout for the original “Alice in Mazeland” became Maze 16 in this program, and, actually, it’s the least interesting of the twenty mazes.

I programmed eight of these mazes in 2001 and kept adding more, until the total is now twenty. In my opinion, the best of these mazes is 15. Unfortunately, it is very difficult, even though its size is only 7x7. Maze 18 does interesting things with loops and is probably the most complex of these mazes, even though its shortest solution is only 57 moves. Back in 2001, that maze was a “Puzzle of the Week” on mathpuzzle.com. That site still has a list of solvers along with some interesting comments, as well as a diagram of the solution that was drawn by Andrea Gilbert. By the way, the comments refer to Maze 7, which was the maze’s number at the time.

When you solve one of these mazes, the program outputs a code that looks something like: Code=842. The number doesn’t mean anything, but you might use it to prove to a friend that you solved a particular maze. Or you might set up a contest where people should solve one or more of these mazes, then e-mail you the numbers that follow Code=.

The maze design and the JavaScript program is copyright © 2001 by Robert Abbott. If you are interested in programming this game for a different device (PDA, cell phone, video game controller), please see my terms of use.

My thanks to “Joker” for supplying me with a Java applet that plays the sound files (I was having trouble getting JavaScript to play sound on all browsers).

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