Valentine's Day Maze:




This maze takes two hands to operate. In your left hand, hold a pointer on circle A, and in your right hand hold a pointer on circle B. The pointer on the left represents your one true soul mate, and the pointer on the right represents you. If you can make a series of moves that bring the two pointers together on the same circle, then we predict you will meet your one true soul mate (that is, if it hasn't already happened).

On each move, one of your pointers travels over a colored path to an adjacent circle. Either pointer can move; there is no need to alternate pointers. And there is this restriction: the color of the path a pointer travels on must match the color of the circle that the other pointer is on. Answer, page 00



Solution to the Valentine's Day maze: There are quite a few different paths to the goal, but the following is the shortest. It shows the different states you have to go through. The starting state is AB, meaning one pointer is on circle A and the other is on circle B. The next state you go to is AC, meaning one pointer's on A and the other is on B. You continue until you reach the final state BB, which means both pointers are on B.

AB-AC-BC-BD-CD-CE-CL-BL-BF-BG-CG-CH-DH-DJ-CJ-CK-BK-BB

If you liked this maze, you might be interested in the complete state diagram of it. When Robert Abbott created the maze, he found it was hard to see where every path was going, and he wanted to make sure there weren't any very short paths to the goal. So he drew the state diagram shown below. In addition to helping in the construction of the maze, it's sort of fun to travel around this diagram as you travel around the maze. In the diagram, the shortest solution is shown in red.



The origin of the Valentine's Day maze: The rules and the layout are original with me. One of my mazes in Mad Mazes had similar rules. It was called "Meteor Storm!" and had a dopey science fiction theme. It had 27 circles, one of which was marked "Goal." For the Valentine's Day maze I reduced the number of circles to 12 and changed the goal to getting both pointers onto the same circle.

"Meteor Storm!" was horribly complex, and I'm pretty sure no one solved it. Most of the mazes in Mad Mazes were too hard. When I wrote the book I thought I should make the mazes as hard as I could. That was obviously a bad idea, but at the time I didn't even think of it. I wish someone had told me.

Note, February 6, 2009: The page you are reading was part of a memo I wrote to GAMES magazine. It contained five mazes that I thought would make good covers for GAMES. They did accept the Valentine's Day maze, but they came up with a much better theme and called it Charge. Here's what it looked like:



And here are their instructions: Two oppositely charged particles are trying to meet up in the same atom. They begin in the top red and yellow atoms. Using one finger from each hand to point at their locations, move either particle along one of the straight "bonds" to an adjacent atom. Here's the catch: A particle may only move along a bond that has the same color as the atom where the other particle is currently located. Can you maneuver both particles to the same atom (any atom) at the same time? ANSWER, PAGE 58

Back to my memo