Mazes

In discussing the version of 10 PRINT found in the 1982 ''Commodore 64 User’s Guide,'' the manual points to the two graphical characters "that the program is using for the maze" (53). So, the output of 10 PRINT was called a maze from the beginning, from the program's first appearance in print. The programmer who submitted the one-line version found in ''Run'' also described it as "drawing a continuous maze." (13) So, whether or not the 10 PRINT pattern that shows on the screen is solvable at every instant, it was consistently identified as a maze in the early 1980s. If everyone were to see the output simply as a pattern of alternating diaglonal lines it surely would not be as interesting to execute, to understand, and to discuss this program. The typical reading of 10 PRINT's output is no just as a pattern, however, but as a maze.

Whether perceived as fun puzzles, places of terror, or invitations to contemplative meanderings, our current cultural idea of the maze (certainly in the Unites States and in much of the West) dates back to the legendary labyrinth of Knossos, a bewildering and even life-threatening space. Mazes have appeared on coins and in spiritual centers. Hedge-row mazes have presented a public, shared diversion. In more recent times, mazes have served as spaces for movement and dance and as commonplace diversions in puzzle-books. Sometimes, mazes are abstract mathematical objects or tools for examining animal behavior. And in computer games, the maze takes on an archetypal, structural frame for adventure, chase, and combat.

The computer has provided new ways of experiencing mazes. In particular, the experience of the maze shifts with the different perspectives commonly associated with video games: first-person, second-person, and third-person. Each entails a different form of embodiment, a different form of subjectivity, and a different perception of space. Experiencing a maze one corridor at a time from a first-person point of view is markedly different from experiencing the same maze as the "you" of a text adventure or through a third-person omniscient or overarching view. By considering how 10 PRINT relates to computers mazes of these types in games, it is possible to understand more about what 10 PRINT's maze means and why this program is an inviting one to try out, to understand, and to modify.

All mazes offer at least one path; the key structural difference is whether they offer more than one, whether they are unicursal or multicursal. This is true whether mazes be physical structures, mathematical constructions, drawings, or dances, or games. In unicursal mazes the space to be navigated is bound and the single path followed; users have no directional decisions to make, save to follow the meanderings of the path, leaving their attention, mind, or emotions free to wander or focus elsewhere, while continuing along, guided by the path itself, to the end at the center of the maze or to a unique exit. The unicursal maze has often been understood as defining motion across time, offering a spiritual and contemplative space to the walker. Understood this way, the path can be taken repeatedly and ritualistically, again and again offering new insight, peace, and spiritual comfort each time. In unicursal hedge mazes, where the hedges often limit one’s vision to an immediate and foreshortened horizon, one is particularly enclosed and protected.

The distinction between unicursal and multicursal mazes bears important implications for how 10 PRINT itself, not its output, can be seen as unicursal and multicursal. Typing in this program, beginning programmers engage in a ritual. At the same time, this program is, initially, a puzzle to those who have some understanding of BASIC but lack a complete command of the Commodore 64 and a full knowledge of the PETSCII table. Once the code has been typed and executed and the programmer witnesses the maze, there is no returning to a naive view of this line of code -- it is impossible to read the line without imagining its output. From the many possible outputs that a Commodore 64 user might imagine, one is seen. With some study, it becomes clear how the program produces this output, and the single path through this short but initially tangled program becomes clear. All the same, this program holds more opportunities than this single path. Since the programmer is encouraged to make changes to the code, newly shaped corridors can appear, and the forms that the maze itself takes prove be practically endless.

The Cretan Labyrinth in Knossos, in which Theseus encountered the Minotaur, is the most famous ancient maze, one which deeply influenced cultural perceptions of the maze into the 1980s, the era of 10 PRINT. That mythical maze held the part-man, part-bull Minotaur, the cursed child of Pasiphae’s unnatural love. This early maze, like a basement or attic in more recent folklore, was the hiding place for a defective, dangerous family member, a hybrid horror. Theseus arrived at Crete and won the affection of Ariadne, the king's daughter, who offered him a means of returning from the labyrinth after he entered it to defeat the Minotaur. She suggested he tie a string to the entrance and unravel it as he proceeds through the maze so that he can follow this thread back to the entrance of the labyrinth. Theseus made his way through the maze, slew the Minotaur, and escaped using this technique. The victorious Greek hero took Ariadne back with him to Athens.

The need for the thread to serve as a “clue” -- the word “clue” (from “clewe”) refers to the skein of yarn “employed to guide any one in ‘threading’ his way into or out of a labyrinth” (OED) -- seems to strongly suggest the false paths and complexity of a multicursal maze, with decision points and false paths to trick the walker. Yet traditional depictions and descriptions of the Cretan labyrinth suggest a unicursal, if very threatening, edifice from which nobody attempting to slay the Minotaur has returned alive. A study of allusions to and descriptions of labyrinths in Homer, Ovid, and other writers of western antiquity provides a range of interpretations of mazes as structures and edifices, dance or ritual pathways, or representations on coins and armor (Homer’s daidala) that is too long to describe in any detail here. Suffice it to say here that the depictions of the Cretan labyrinth as a dark, complex structure (see Ovid via Doob) and the need for a pointer toward the entrace, to distinguish in from out, may suffice to explain why anyone, Greek hero or otherwise, would want to thread his way along even a unicursal path.

An interesting aspect of the early maze of Knossos is that legend explains not only who commissioned it and who inhabited it, but also who designed it. Daedalus was the artful architect of confusion and master designer of the labyrinth at Knossos, and has a place of honor as puzzle-maker supreme: Genre fiction and Joyce both nod to him, for instance. Daedalus was the first in a long and living history of maze designers and programmers to understand that planning, intentionality, and construction are integral characteristics of the mystique of the maze. 10 PRINT is culturally resonant because it is a blueprint for a maze and a system for constructing a maze, not just a structure or image that appears without any history or trace of its making.

Starting from the exterior, the "path" runs inwards a short distance, turns so as to run parallel with the other wall until nearly a full circuit has been completed, then doubles back on itself and runs round in the opposite direction, doubles upon itself again, and so on until it finally comes to a stop in a blind end, having traversed all of the space within the outer walls without covering any part twice and without forming any branches or loops. (45). [Image]

10 PRINT does not put the user in the role of either clever Ariadne, heroic Theseus, or the hunted maze inhabitant, the Minotaur. Rather, the program itself acts as a sort of Daedalus. Initially, as the user types the program in and runs it without much of an idea of what it will do or why, the user is simply shoveling characters from page to screen like a laborer brought on to build a maze. But as the user traces the path of the program and resolves its many twists into an understanding, a solution of sorts, 10 PRINT offers the person at the Commodore 64 the opportunity to collaborate with Daedalus and to fashion new mazes.

The associations evoked by 10 PRINT may begin with the Minotaur's maze, but they continue through history, adding to the complex symbology and sacred rites of Christian churches. Mazes have appeared on the floors of cathedrals and basilicas, which are themselves already highly allegorical spaces. The earliest known labyrinth was placed in the Basilica of Saint Reparata (Algiers) in 324 CE. Among the most famous and one of the largest (approx. 12.3 m) church labyrinths is at Chartres (ca. 1200 CE). It is a walkable 11-circuit labyrinth ornamented around its outer-ring with “lunations” (Kern 153). Called “Domus Daedali” (The House of Daedalus) it has been the object of endless speculation, from rumors of treasure buried under its center to its functioning as a lunar calculator. No wonder, since mazes and labyrinths, as loci of convoluted meaning, invite decoding and interpretation.

Church mazes tend to be labyrinths that were walked or crawled on the path to penance, allegorical pathways with names like Labyrinth of Sin, The Path to Redemption, Easter Dance, Images of a Worldview, and The Path to Jerusalem. These walkable pathways symbolized paths to Christian salvation, telling not a Minoan mystery but a Paschal one. Their entrances typically face the western wall of the church, on which scenes of The Last Judgment are depicted. As with a rosary and the stations of the cross, the Christian labyrinth is unicursal. None contained dead-ends or choice points until the 15th century, when the multicursal aberration appears, as Helmut Birkhan explains, as a "symptom of the secularization of the labyrinth idea" (quoted in Kern 146).

The introduction of hedge mazes, in particular, is noteworthy, for they have characteristics also found in 10 PRINT. Like all mazes, hedge mazes need to be planned and plotted, but unlike most other mazes, they grow. 10 PRINT's maze does as well, albeit in a different way: Once seeded, the computer-generated maze requires none of the tending and nurturing the hedge mazes need, growing until the viewer interrupts it. It's also resonant that among the many ways of experiencing hedge mazes, the most exhilirating is “running” the maze. This way of encountering the maze was carried into video games such as ''Doom.'' In a different way, cascading display that results from running 10 PRINT is as crazed and zig-zagging as the side-to-side motion of children gamboling through the hedges. Of hedge mazes facilitating this sort of play, a particularly famous one is that of the Hampton Court Palace in London. Its design is attributed to Christopher Wren; the maze may date back to the time of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the palace's first occupant (Kern 261). Miller writes of its roughly half-mile of path: "It may be a sad sight to the 'highbrows' of horticulture, but to the unsophisticated many it is a never-failing source of merriment" (129). He describes the maze as an "undiluted delight" to "scores of hundred of children, not to mention a fair sprinkling of their elders" (129).

As a running display, 10 PRINT retains a dimension of mystery, baffling the viewer with its playful invitation to follow its paths with the eye. 10 PRINT offers no path to religious practice, but the association of mazes and mysterious rituals does attend the later use of the program. As code, 10 PRINT taps into the maze-like mystery that visual symbols evoke: to type in a program from a manual is to follow the twisted line from code to output and back again. The programmer follows the single path of the code from ignorance to knowledge; this is the path of a pilgrim. It may not help programmers attain Christian salvation or welcome the Pagan coming of Spring, but it does offer an accessible means by which novice programmers can trace the steps of writing code and being initiated into the mysteries of a magic box, the personal computer.