Mazes
From Maze
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An interesting reversal happens as math takes up mazes. As maze-solving algorithms are applied to more and more real world puzzles, they in turn prove themselves to be mazes of telephones, rest stops, and resisters. Even more importantly, the terror of the maze is not the minotaur but time itself, time which can be just as easily lost in unproductive paths. | An interesting reversal happens as math takes up mazes. As maze-solving algorithms are applied to more and more real world puzzles, they in turn prove themselves to be mazes of telephones, rest stops, and resisters. Even more importantly, the terror of the maze is not the minotaur but time itself, time which can be just as easily lost in unproductive paths. | ||
| − | Of course, the celebrity of 10 Print... grows out of the quest for optimization, where the clever distillation of a solution to one line becomes the sign of mastery. The mathematical grand challenge of finding the shortest path thus introduces the aesthetic of optimization into the lore of mazes. Mazes become the basic structure of the challenges to modern computing, business, and civic life. 10 PRINT... in this light pays tribute to a most fundamental structure of contemporary life and the obstacle to commercial profits, traffic flows, and the coursing of information over networks. The maze and the network prove themselves to be cousins when treated by the Thesei of mathematics. | + | Of course, the celebrity of 10 Print... grows out of the quest for optimization, where the clever distillation of a solution to one line becomes the sign of mastery. The mathematical grand challenge of finding the shortest path thus introduces the aesthetic of optimization into the lore of mazes. Mazes become the basic structure of the challenges to modern computing, business, and civic life. 10 PRINT... in this light pays tribute to a most fundamental structure of contemporary life and the obstacle to commercial profits, traffic flows, and the coursing of information over networks. The maze and the network prove themselves to be cousins when treated by the Thesei of mathematics. 10 PRINT... is a thread, the clue, that leads gradually (and infinitely) toward goal of optimizing processes in the source code that will shape and control so much of civic life. |
James E. Kelley, J., & Walker, M. R. (1959). Critical-path planning and scheduling. In Papers presented at the December 1-3, 1959, eastern joint IRE-AIEE-ACM computer conference (pp. 160-173). Boston, Massachusetts: ACM. doi:10.1145/1460299.1460318 | James E. Kelley, J., & Walker, M. R. (1959). Critical-path planning and scheduling. In Papers presented at the December 1-3, 1959, eastern joint IRE-AIEE-ACM computer conference (pp. 160-173). Boston, Massachusetts: ACM. doi:10.1145/1460299.1460318 | ||
