Maze Mania.

• James Roe
  April 20th, 2007 at 10:49 am

  I wonder if it is possible to beat the time on your first try using the maze algorithm. For those of you who are not familiar with it, you essentially take a right hand turn at any intersection, you will eventually traverse the entire maze, or at least make it to the finish.

• Adam
  April 20th, 2007 at 2:01 pm

  Since it sounds like there is a goal to the maze, there’s a potential that using the right-hand rule to traverse the maze could lead you to the exit before finding “the cheese.” It would actually be very devious of them if they explicitly designed the maze to foil the right hand rule in this way.

• mutterhals
  April 20th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

  There’s another trick where you place your hand on the side of the maze and follow the path (without removing your hand) to the end.

• MrPumpernickel
  April 20th, 2007 at 6:04 pm

  That’s actually the same trick, it just means you’re touching the wall. Coincidentally the trick works on consistency, it doesn’t matter if you take right or left as long as you’re consistent. However, this doesn’t ensure that you’ll find the cheese.

  For anyone interested, here’s the satellite image of the maze: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=+33%C2%B034%2758.56%22N,++79%C 2%B0+0%2755.45%22W&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=18&ll=33.583194,-79.015158&spn=0.0 02771,0.004844&t=k&om=1

• Alex
  April 20th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

  The trick would fail if for some reason you start in an “island” inside of the maze.

• Slith
  April 21st, 2007 at 12:20 am

  Just follow a wall. One way or the other, doesn’t matter. You follow a wall, and it’ll eventually lead out.

• James Roe
  April 21st, 2007 at 11:43 am

  “The trick would fail if for some reason you start in an “island” inside of the maze.”

  No, because there would still presumably be a right hand turn to get out of it. If the outside wall was just one big square it might fail, but I would wager that you would notice that you could see all the way from one corner to the next.

• Alex
  April 21st, 2007 at 11:55 am

  “No, because there would still presumably be a right hand turn to get out of it.”

  Actually, the right-hand turn “rule” will fail if the person starts inside a disjointed island. In this case, you need something called a Pledge algorithm to solve this problem.

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