(or . . . the Site Formerly Known
as “Robert Abbott’s Mazes”)
 

I should explain why this site has a new name and a new location. The explanation may go on a little too long, so if your mind starts to wander just scroll down to the heading Puzzles to see what else is on the site. “Robert Abbott’s Mazes” didn’t really describe the site because I also have mazes by Richard Tucker, Adrian Fisher, Erich Friedman, John McCallion, and Andrea Gilbert. In the future I hope to add mazes by others. The “Mazes” part of the site’s name was also not quite right because they aren’t really mazes. But what exactly are these puzzles? In the past I’ve referred to them as “mazes-with-rules,” an accurate but clunky and uninspiring phrase. On his site www.mathpuzzle.com, Ed Pegg Jr. calls them “multi-state mazes.” That name is interesting, but it’s a little hard to explain what it means. (What it means is you can be on a certain spot in a maze at one time and at a later time you can be on that same spot but in a different state. Now the problem is explaining why that is so great. It is great, but why?)

I’ve spent a long time wrestling with this nomenclature and now, finally, I have a good name to describe our puzzles: logic mazes. And the name wasn’t even my idea. It was thought up by Don Frantz (that’s him at the right). Don is the genius who invented the idea of building a maze in a cornfield. For the last two summers, Don has added three of what I used to call my walk-through mazes-with-rules to each of his cornfield mazes. Don figured out that it would be a lot better to call them logic mazes. More about Don: Before he started building mazes he was a theatrical producer. He began his career in a gorilla suit at Hershey Park and went on to produce magic shows and then shows for Disney. Don was an associate producer on Disney’s Broadway version of The Lion King.

And what exactly does “logic mazes” mean? Well, you can’t really get too exact here. Mostly a logic maze is like a logic puzzle, except it’s a maze. If you want more extensive rationalization, you could say that a logic maze is a closed system of rules in the same way that a logic system is a closed set of rules. I hope a better name will help us popularize this form of puzzle. I could see more use of logic mazes in books, mechanical puzzles, and walk-through mazes. I had also hoped to see more logic mazes in video games, but this is unlikely to happen. Video game companies use every new innovation in computer technology to add more realism to their games, and the more realism they add, the dumber the games become. Ninety percent of these games involve shooting at things or running around a track. With their emphasis on greater realism and mindless content, they are like the “feelies” in Brave New World. If “logic mazes” really became an accepted term, I thought that someone might reserve www.logicmazes.com, so I reserved it myself. Then I found out that it’s just as easy to move my site to the address as it is to reserve it. So, that’s why I’m at this new address.

Puzzles

[That’s all I copied from December’s home page.]