Logic Mazes

Recent news:  The current issue of GAMES (dated September, 2008) has another of my mazes on its cover. Two separate pointers are used to move through this maze. Some of the mazes in my books also had two active elements, but they were all much too difficult. After a lot of long, hard work I was able to come up with this easier maze for the cover. You should be able to solve it in less than an hour.

The best thing about the maze is that the solution is accompanied by a state diagram that provides a complete description of the paths. It’s sort of fun just to run through this diagram. For a discussion of state diagrams, see Ed Pegg Jr’s article on Multi-State Mazes.

This issue of GAMES should be in all the chain bookstores by about the middle of July.

The following are pointers to everything that is on this site.

Theseus and the Minotaur:

These mazes have been on this site, in one form or another, since 1998. Recently they were published as a download by Kristanix Games. My Theseus page has information about the Kristanix download, a history of the mazes, and it still has Toby Nelson’s Java applet to play the mazes.

The picture at the right is a view (somewhat reduced) of Level 79 of the Kristanix download. It is the same as Maze 9 in Toby Nelson’s applet—so you can try it with either of these programs.

Eyeball Mazes:

There are 12 interactive mazes here. They use a simple concept—you travel to a square that has either the same symbol or the same color as the square you just left—but there are added complications and some of the mazes are very tricky.

Alice Mazes:

This is a series of eight interactive mazes that I created and programmed in JavaScript.

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.

Sliding Door Maze:

This is programmed in Java by Oriel Maximé and is based on a maze from my book SuperMazes. It’s very difficult. There is only a single layout, mostly because I haven’t been able to design a second layout (creating that first layout was hard enough). But a guy in Finland and a guy in Texas were able to create and program several new layouts. They also make some interesting changes in the rules. I write more about their mazes at the bottom of the Sliding Door page.

Tilt Mazes:

These are four mazes by Andrea Gilbert. You will be able to try both a non-interactive version and an interactive Java version of each maze. (And I try to explain why anyone would want both a non-interactive version and an interactive version of a maze.) There is also news about a walk-through Tilt Maze.

Number Mazes:

This is a series of four mazes that I programmed in JavaScript. The first is the Easy Number Maze. Not only is it easy, but it will even display its solution if you ask it to. No solution is provided for the other three mazes, and each is more difficult than the previous maze in the series. They are the Not-So-Easy Number Maze, the Changing-Rule Number Maze, and the No-U-Turn Number Maze.

Things That Roll:

Another interesting part of this web site is a collection of rolling-block mazes. For the most part, these mazes are not interactive. Instead, you’re asked to print the maze, tape some dice together to form a weirdly-shaped block, then roll the block across the maze. The mazes were created by many different people in the kind of collaborative effort that could only happen on the Internet.

I also have a collection of rolling-cube mazes. These involve rolling a single die across a page. They were predecessors to the rolling-block mazes.

The Bureaucratic Maze:

I call this a maze, but it could also be called a piece of performance art. Once it gets started, there can be about 30 people carrying forms between bureaucrats seated at five different desks. The forms give you a limited choice about which desks to go to, and if you make the right choices, you’ll reach the goal (though at the beginning you don’t even know what the goal is). Here is my write-up of the maze.

This maze has been tried a few times by me and other people. Wei-Hwa Huang ran a variation that he disguised as a registration process. The participants did not even know they were in a maze (at least, not at first). Eric Shamblen turned a variation of the maze into an on-line program that you can play on your own. The Bureaucratic Maze may (or may not) appear again at some time in the future.

Dungeon Mazes:

These are just plans for mazes that I’m hoping to see built somewhere. There is now no physical implementation of the mazes, so there is nothing to travel through, but if you’re really interested you can trace a route through the plans.

Starry Night Maze:

This is a maze of mine that appeared on the cover of GAMES magazine—the issue of December, 2006. It’s a little like the Eyeball Mazes, but with hexagons instead of rectangles. It is, however, an advance for me because it is the first time I was able to use real art in a maze.

What I had submitted to GAMES was an abstract maze drawn on a grid of hexagons. Jim Malloy, the magazine’s art director, came up with a theme for the maze and he created the art for the cover. I then programmed an interactive version of the maze and I incorporated Malloy’s art. It looks quite good. And not only that, if you solve the maze, the program has a winning display where all the stars twinkle. I can stare at that for hours (well maybe at least two minutes).

My interactive version is on the GAMES site, at this location. By the way, if you are using a dial-up connection along with an accelerator, turn the accelerator off before you go to the interactive version. I use animated GIFs, and accelerators don’t load them properly.

A booklet you can order from me:

My mail-order page is at this address. There used to be more here, but now everything is sold out, except for my booklet Auction 2002 and Eleusis. Auction is the latest revision of an old card game of mine, and it was presented in Games magazine (in the issue dated April, 2002).

Links:

Be sure to visit my page of links. It has pointers to the sites of others who are working with this form of maze. There are also pointers to other game and puzzle sites.

How to Locate a Good Cornfield Maze:

There are now hundreds of these mazes, and this provides some help in sorting through them.

Mazes We Visited — Summer of 2007:

This starts out like a journal, but then I get into reviews (good and bad, but mostly bad) of various mazes. I explain what they do right and what they do wrong, and I give my own opinion of what a maze should be. I have a brief history of the rise and fall of wooden fence mazes, and I think I have a good explanation of why they disappeared. I also warn that cornfield mazes could suffer the same fate.

Walk-Through Logic Mazes:

Small walk-through logic mazes can be found outside of many of the large cornfield mazes, and others are beginnng to appear on their own in other locations. They are designed by me and also by Adrian Fisher, Andrea Gilbert, Dave Phillips, and John Taggart.

This site has two sections about these mazes. The first section describes how this concept developed from 1993 through 1998.

The second section is just pictures—showing the mazes during the summer of 1999.

Mazes to Visit:

This is an old article (from 1998) that gives my thoughts and some recommendations on full-size (conventional) mazes you can walk through. The article is mostly about fence mazes. Fence mazes are great, but there aren’t many of them left.

The Garden Maze at Luray, Virginia:

This is a short write-up of a hedge maze—the only large (well, fairly large) hedge maze in America. We are way behind England in this regard.

Sacred Labyrinths:

This article is something of a “non-believer’s guide” to sacred labyrinths. I argue that single-path labyrinths are interesting even if you aren’t on a spiritual quest. The article was inspired by Annette Reynold’s beach labyrinth, shown here.

New Age Flim Flam at a Labyrinth in Santa Fe:

This is something of a rant. It’s about a labyrinth with a strange echo effect at its center. At first, I thought this effect was a magic trick some New Age whackos had added to fool people into accepting their beliefs. And what made me really mad was I couldn’t figure out how the trick was done. Well, the truth was more complicated (and weirder) than I thought. After I posted the essay, I received several letters (also posted here) that explain how the trick is done—and it isn’t really a trick.