

What Bright termed "mutually accessible centers" ( The Great Maze Book, 1973) also called "braid" mazes, allowed a proliferation of paths flowing in spiral patterns from a central nexus and, rather than relying on "dead ends" to hinder progress, instead relied on an overabundance of pathway choices. Bright's works also offered examples of extremely complex patterns of routing and optical illusions for the solver to work through. Greg Bright's works went beyond the standard published forms of the time by including "weave" mazes in which illustrated pathways can cross over and under each other.

Although the routing was comparable to or simpler than Koziakin's mazes, the Brightfields' mazes did not allow the various pathway options to be discerned easily by the roving eye as it glanced about. The works of the Brightfields had a similar two-dimensional form but used a variety of graphics-oriented "path obscuring" techniques. Koziakin's works were predominantly of the standard two-dimensional "trace a line between the walls" variety. Some of the best-selling books in the 1970s and early 1980s included those produced by Vladimir Koziakin, Rick and Glory Brightfield, Dave Phillips, Larry Evans, and Greg Bright. In the 1970s there occurred a publishing "maze craze" in which numerous books, and some magazines, were commercially available in nationwide outlets and devoted exclusively to mazes of a complexity that was able to challenge adults as well as children (for whom simple maze puzzles have long been provided both before, during, and since the 1970s "craze"). Numerous mazes of different kinds have been drawn, painted, published in books and periodicals, used in advertising, in software, and sold as art. Using the number in your space, jump that number of blocks in a straight line to a new space. Turf mazes and mizmazes A pattern like a long rope folded up, without any junctions or crossings. Picture maze A standard maze that forms a picture when solved. Number maze A maze in which numbers are used to determine jumps that form a pathway, allowing the maze to criss-cross itself many times. A graphical variant of this maze type is an arrow maze. Through the use of reciprocal doors, (These are doors that open automatically on one side when you open them on the other side.) The correct path can intersect the incorrect path on a single plane.
#Hamster maze youtube series#
The path is a series of loops interrupted by doors. The player may not return through a door through which he has entered, so dead ends may be created. The doors can lead to the correct path or create traps that divert you from the correct path and lead you to the starting point. Loops and traps maze A maze that features one-way doors. Logic mazes These are like standard mazes except they use rules other than "don't cross the lines" to restrict motion. Often, a railroad maze will have a single track for entrance and exit. Solvers are constrained to moving only forward. Linear or railroad maze A maze in which the paths are laid out like a railroad with switches and crossovers. Hamilton maze A maze in which the goal is to find the unique Hamiltonian cycle. Fractal maze A maze containing holes inside which the maze is indefinitely repeated at a smaller scale. Block maze A maze in which the player must complete or clear the maze pathway by positioning blocks. Examples are:Ī plan of a Loops and Traps Maze, Ridgewood, NJ 2008 Ball-in-a-maze puzzles Dexterity puzzles which involve navigating a ball through a maze or labyrinth. Such experiments typically use rats or mice. Mazes are often used in psychology experiments to study spatial navigation and learning. Intuitively, if one pulled and stretched out the paths in the maze in the proper way, the result could be made to resemble a tree.

Thus many maze solving algorithms are closely related to graph theory. Mazes containing no loops are known as "standard", or "perfect" mazes, and are equivalent to a tree in graph theory.

The mathematician Leonhard Euler was one of the first to analyze plane mazes mathematically, and in doing so made the first significant contributions to the branch of mathematics known as topology. Some maze solving methods are designed to be used inside the maze by a traveler with no prior knowledge of the maze, whereas others are designed to be used by a person or computer program that can see the whole maze at once. Maze solving is the act of finding a route through the maze from the start to finish.
