A picture maze is a maze puzzle designed to resemble something visually, or one where the solution traces out a particular picture.
A picture maze is a maze puzzle designed to resemble something visually, or one where the solution traces out a particular picture.
Picture mazes were first pioneered by Francesco Segala, a 15th-century architect from Padua, Italy. He created puzzle maze designs, mainly in figurative forms. His designs included ships, dolphins, crabs, dogs, snails, horsemen and human figures. It is doubtful whether any of his designs were actually constructed in hedges. [1]
In 1975, the English maze designer Randoll Coate began his life's work of creating numerous "symbolic" mazes, which combined a distinctive outer image with further internal symbols and images. His earliest works, built as hedge mazes in the landscape, included "Imprint" (a gigantic footprint) in a private garden in Oxfordhsire, England in 1975; "Creation" (egg-shaped, containing a Minotaur, and - alternatively but superimposed - the Garden of Eden story) at Varmlands Saby, Varmlands, Sweden, in 1977; and "Pyramid" at the Château de Belœil, Belgium, in 1979. Randoll Coate went on to create many dozens of further symbolic mazes, 15 in conjunction with fellow Englishman Adrian Fisher.
The world's first cornfield maize maze was a picture maze, portraying a Stegosaurus (it being the year that the film Jurassic Park was premiered). This maze was created in 1993 at Lebanon Valley College, Annville, Pennsylvania, USA. It was the first of six cornfield maize mazes, each designed by Adrian Fisher, that have set Guinness World Records for progressively larger maize mazes, each one being a picture maze.
A style of pen-and-paper picture maze popularized by Japanese publisher Nikoli, known as ukidashi meiro or PictoMazes, involves solving a maze puzzle in the regular way, drawing a path from the entrance to exit of the puzzle, avoiding the dead ends. The shape of this shortest path - particularly if emphasized by coloring in the grid squares visited - then reveals a hidden picture.
Because of two rules, it is far simpler to reverse the process to solve this puzzle. Starting at a dead end, the path is filled until it reaches an intersection with three or more paths connecting to it. This process is repeated until all dead-end paths are filled, often showing the shortest path. On larger pieces, this is the only way to solve, as there are too many possible but incorrect paths, and chance of finding the correct path based on intuition, logic or simple luck is almost nonexistent.
Using computer algorithms, picture mazes can be created at different difficulty levels by controlling the length and density of the false paths. There are picture mazes in various sizes, from small mazes of 25×25 and up to colossal poster mazes of 200×200.[ citation needed ]
In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was an elaborate, confusing structure designed and built by the legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos. Its function was to hold the Minotaur, the monster eventually killed by the hero Theseus. Daedalus had so cunningly made the Labyrinth that he could barely escape it after he built it.
A maze is a path or collection of paths, typically from an entrance to a goal. The word is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching ("unicursal") patterns that lead unambiguously through a convoluted layout to a goal. The pathways and walls in a maze are typically fixed, but puzzles in which the walls and paths can change during the game are also categorised as mazes or tour puzzles.
In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized.
The Tower of Hanoi is a mathematical game or puzzle consisting of three rods and a number of disks of various diameters, which can slide onto any rod. The puzzle begins with the disks stacked on one rod in order of decreasing size, the smallest at the top, thus approximating a conical shape. The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to the last rod, obeying the following rules:
Maze generation algorithms are automated methods for the creation of mazes.
Nonograms, also known as Hanjie, Paint by Numbers, Picross, Griddlers, and Pic-a-Pix, and by various other names, are picture logic puzzles in which cells in a grid must be colored or left blank according to numbers at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden pixel art-like picture. In this puzzle type, the numbers are a form of discrete tomography that measures how many unbroken lines of filled-in squares there are in any given row or column. For example, a clue of "4 8 3" would mean there are sets of four, eight, and three filled squares, in that order, with at least one blank square between successive sets.
Hampton Court Maze is a hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace and the oldest surviving hedge maze in Britain.
Adrian Fisher is a British pioneer, inventor, designer and creator of mazes, puzzles, public art, tessellations, tilings, patterns and networks of many kinds. He is responsible for more than 700 mazes in 42 countries since 1979.
Pathfinding or pathing is the plotting, by a computer application, of the shortest route between two points. It is a more practical variant on solving mazes. This field of research is based heavily on Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path on a weighted graph.
Historically, a turf maze is a labyrinth made by cutting a convoluted path into a level area of short grass, turf or lawn. Some had names such as Mizmaze, Troy Town, The Walls of Troy, Julian's Bower, or Shepherd's Race. This is the type of maze referred to by William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Titania says:
Mizmaze is the name given to two of England's eight surviving historic turf mazes, and also to a third, presumably once similar site that is now merely a relic. Of the two which survive, one is at Breamore, in Hampshire; the other is on top of St Catherine's Hill, overlooking the city of Winchester, Hampshire.
Gilbert Randoll Coate was a British diplomat, maze designer and "labyrinthologist".
A hedge maze is an outdoor garden maze or labyrinth in which the "walls" or dividers between passages are made of vertical hedges.
In computer science, graph traversal refers to the process of visiting each vertex in a graph. Such traversals are classified by the order in which the vertices are visited. Tree traversal is a special case of graph traversal.
A corn maze or maize maze is a maze cut out of a corn field. Originally, the first full-size corn maze was believed to be created in Annville, Pennsylvania in 1993; however, similar corn mazes were highlighted in newspapers as early as 1982. Corn mazes have become popular tourist attractions in North America, and are a way for farms to generate tourist income. Many are based on artistic designs such as characters from movies. Corn mazes appear in many different designs. Some mazes are even created to tell stories or to portray a particular theme. Most have a path which goes all around the whole pattern, either to end in the middle or to come back out again, with various false trails diverging from the main path. In the United Kingdom, they are known as maize mazes, and are especially popular with farms in the east of England. These mazes are normally combined with other farm attractions of interest to families and day trippers. Some of these attractions include hay rides, a petting zoo, play areas for children, and picnic areas. Each year a few of the mazes are featured in national newspapers and TV. In the U.S., corn mazes typically are cut down circa the first week of November; in the UK typically in September after children return to school.
A solver is a piece of mathematical software, possibly in the form of a stand-alone computer program or as a software library, that 'solves' a mathematical problem. A solver takes problem descriptions in some sort of generic form and calculates their solution. In a solver, the emphasis is on creating a program or library that can easily be applied to other problems of similar type.
Finca Los Alamos is a historical Argentine estancia located in San Rafael, Mendoza. The estate was built in 1830 by the Bombal family, and originally served as a frontier fort. Domingo Bombal, who served eleven terms as Governor to the Mendoza Province, owned the estate until his death in 1908.
A maze-solving algorithm is an automated method for the solving a maze. The random mouse, wall follower, Pledge, and Trémaux's algorithms are designed to be used inside the maze by a traveler with no prior knowledge of the maze, whereas the dead-end filling and shortest path algorithms are designed to be used by a person or computer program that can see the whole maze at once.
The k shortest path routing problem is a generalization of the shortest path routing problem in a given network. It asks not only about a shortest path but also about next k−1 shortest paths. A variation of the problem is the loopless k shortest paths.