Easy Maze 4:

Travel along the roads from START to FINISH. At each intersection follow one of the arrows. That is, you can turn in a certain direction only when there is a curved line in that direction, and you can go straight only when there is a straight line. U-turns are not allowed.

This maze might be a little too easy, but if you click here, you can try a fairly difficult maze with the same rules.

Okay—I said that the mazes here would be easy, but I never said the commentary about them would be easy. So, the commentary here gets a little complicated:

The rules for this maze go back to a puzzle of mine that appeared in Martin Gardner’s column in the October, 1962, Scientific American. It was an early example of a “maze-with-rules,” a form of puzzle that has now become quite widespread. There were precedents before 1962, but none of the precedents were also multi-state. “Multi-state” here means that you can be at one point in the maze, but you can be in more than one state depending on how you got to that point. Ed Pegg, Jr believes that the multi-state attribute is important in a maze, and he wrote an article on this subject for the web site of the Mathematical Association of America. Ed needed a simple maze to illustrate his points, so I created the above maze to use in the article. There is also an interesting flow chart in the article that completely describes the maze. I did not supply a solution for this maze, because it’s too easy, but if you really want a solution you can figure one out from that flow chart. Of course, figuring out the flow chart is a lot harder than just solving the maze.

To Easy Maze 5.

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