Cultural History of Mazes
From Maze
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This has important implications for how the notion is abstracted and how 10-Print becomes a maze and a labyrinth. Typing in the program, the beginning programmer engages in the ritual. At the same time, the program begins as a maze to the initiated. Unless the programmer is already fluent in C64 Basic and has memorized the PETSCII tables, she is unlikely to recognize the effects of the program. Once the code has been typed in and executed and the programmer sees the maze, there is no returning to the previous status of the line. This is similar to the process of becoming literate, but not exactly. Nonetheless, these are not mazes that have single solutions. When the programmer is encouraged to make changes to the code, new corridors appear, and the maze itself proves to be endless. | This has important implications for how the notion is abstracted and how 10-Print becomes a maze and a labyrinth. Typing in the program, the beginning programmer engages in the ritual. At the same time, the program begins as a maze to the initiated. Unless the programmer is already fluent in C64 Basic and has memorized the PETSCII tables, she is unlikely to recognize the effects of the program. Once the code has been typed in and executed and the programmer sees the maze, there is no returning to the previous status of the line. This is similar to the process of becoming literate, but not exactly. Nonetheless, these are not mazes that have single solutions. When the programmer is encouraged to make changes to the code, new corridors appear, and the maze itself proves to be endless. | ||
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| + | '''Mazes in Mass Media''' | ||
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| + | According to Clifford Pickover, the first major maze movie was aptly called The Maze, a 1953 horror film directed by William Cameron Menzies. The maze in the film was the hedgerow kind, like the snowed-under maze of The Shining. Pickover adds Labyrinth and The Man in the Maze to his list movie mazes. | ||
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| + | In the 1980s around the time of these early video games, a made-for-TV movie, Mazes and Monsters, presented a young Tom Hanks as a young man who had gone over the edge into a psychosis where he could no longer separate his role-playing game from reality. Such a movie spoke to both the moral panic around the rpg Dungeons and Dragons and the relationship between that game and the maze motif. | ||
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| + | In these examples, the maze becomes a metaphor of horror and confusion. It is the site for getting lost as opposed to a riddle ot be solved. | ||
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| + | '''Computer Generated Mazes ''' | ||
| + | Pickover also includes a section on "the largest computer-generated maze in the world," a title which seems quaint by today's standards. Although he notes the program could generate an 1000-page maze, he sites the largest one she had printed to date as a 200-page maze. However, he gives the title to the 1987 maze produced by Walter Pullen. This 23-foot maze had to be stored on "eight floppy disks" and "require one megabyte of disk space" (7). | ||
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| + | Needless to say, this quest for the largest computer-generated maze will always be chasing 10-Print, whose never ending corridors can be drawn merely by executing and repeating that line. Presumably these other mazes are single-solution mazes. However, Moore's law no doubt affects maze production at about the same rate that 1 megabyte diminishes as a sign of large memory. | ||
