Mazes
From Maze
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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 that has them trace a string of characters without variation. 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 line emerges between input and output. 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 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 that has them trace a string of characters without variation. 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 line emerges between input and output. 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. | ||
| − | === Mythical Mazes === | + | === Death and Danger === |
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 thanks to Ariadne's thread. The victorious Greek hero took Ariadne back with him to Athens. | 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 thanks to Ariadne's thread. The victorious Greek hero took Ariadne back with him to Athens. | ||
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An interesting aspect of the early maze of Knossos is that legend celebrates not merely the man and woman who overcame it but also the one who devised it. Daedalus was the artful architect of confusion and master designer of the labyrinth at Knossos, and has consequently one 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. And yet it presents a maze without an architect, or rather in 10 PRINT, the process itself becomes the producer. Such a transformation will have larger ramifications for the study of programming culture where the cult of the author, though arguably persisting in the study of algorithms, is eclipsed by the potential for any programmer to become a Daedalus on their own. | An interesting aspect of the early maze of Knossos is that legend celebrates not merely the man and woman who overcame it but also the one who devised it. Daedalus was the artful architect of confusion and master designer of the labyrinth at Knossos, and has consequently one 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. And yet it presents a maze without an architect, or rather in 10 PRINT, the process itself becomes the producer. Such a transformation will have larger ramifications for the study of programming culture where the cult of the author, though arguably persisting in the study of algorithms, is eclipsed by the potential for any programmer to become a Daedalus on their own. | ||
| + | This equation of the maze with danger and horror would continue to haunt the form even in contemporary film. A snowed-over hedge maze, for example, adds to the horror hiding within "The Shining" (1980). Also in the '80s as adolescent boys and girls busied themselves with 24-sided dice playing ''Dungeons and Dragons'', a made-for-TV movie, ''Mazes and Monsters'' (1982), presented 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. The movie spoke to both the moral panic around ''Dungeons & Dragons'' and underscored the popular conceptual relationship between mazes and dungeons. More importantly, it suggested that an (evidently) harmless maze within a game could become the threatening and potentially fatal maze that, in legend, Theseus faced. | ||
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It is not actually known whether the labyrinth in Knossos was real or mythology; no ruins of the edifice remain. Yet the telling of this myth includes a pattern that, as Matthews notes, became convention over the centuries: | It is not actually known whether the labyrinth in Knossos was real or mythology; no ruins of the edifice remain. Yet the telling of this myth includes a pattern that, as Matthews notes, became convention over the centuries: | ||
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In this way, 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 programmer becomes an apprentice to 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 an enslaved Cretan 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. | In this way, 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 programmer becomes an apprentice to 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 an enslaved Cretan 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. | ||
| − | === Material Mazes === | + | === Ritual and Allegory === |
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 and then rising in the turf and hedges of the countryside. Mazes take on religious import on the floors of cathedrals and basilicas, which are themselves already highly allegorical spaces, with the earliest appearing 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, consistently invite decoding and interpretation. | 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 and then rising in the turf and hedges of the countryside. Mazes take on religious import on the floors of cathedrals and basilicas, which are themselves already highly allegorical spaces, with the earliest appearing 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, consistently invite decoding and interpretation. | ||
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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, a pilgrim's path. 10 PRINT 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. | 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, a pilgrim's path. 10 PRINT 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. | ||
| − | + | While Mazes have been rendered in stone, hedge, and turf, but mazes do not require high, mossy walls or lines drawn on marble, dancers have created the pathways of mazes through their movements since the earliest tales of Theseus. Dancers weave their steps and movements in space and through time and, in so doing, create an invisible fabric in and of space. The The oeuvre of the choreographer, the Daedalus of dance, plays out on the dance floor through sequences of dancers’ steps. These maze dances have followed a similar trajectory through ancient myth, christian and pagan rituals, and secular cultural expression in art. | |
| − | === Mazes in Dance === | ||
| − | |||
| − | A maze becomes a dance when the pathways are seen as proscribing a dancer's path. The intertwining of dance and labyrinth, of bodies moving in mazes, is ancient. Dance, once a sacred, ceremonial, and ritual practice (just as the maze was a sacred pattern), has become the secular performance now known in the West. Dancers weave their steps and movements in space and through time; in so doing they create an invisible fabric in and of space. The choreographer’s oeuvre is played out on the dance floor through sequences of dancers’ steps; the choreographer’s multi-dimensional vision is invoked, interpreted, and performed by bodies in motion through space. The labyrinth can the seen as the trace of this motion. The canvas takes shape in world where there are many choices about how to move; the dancers on stage, “in performance,” run through this world from beginning to end as though moving through a unicursal, fully plotted path. The labyrinth becomes multicursal for dancers when the plot thickens with improvisation. | ||
In the Iliad, Homer credits Daedalus both with a dance floor and the labyrinth. Kern speculates that labyrinth was a choros, which has the double meaning of dance and dance surface. Since no labyrinthine building in Crete survives, the depictions of labyrinths on coins may indicate the path of the dance rather than an architected structure. Though the Cretan labyrinth did not survive into the present, the maze dances based on it have. Theseus met the Minotaur in a Minoan maze, but he and his men immortalized that adventure in dance on the way back from their mission. As Miller explains, "on the island of Delos they performed a peculiar dance called the Geranos, or 'Crane Dane,' in which they went through the motions of threading the Labyrinth, and ... this dance was perpetuated by the natives of that island until fairly recently" (19). These dances have continued to be performed in Italy, Corfu, Munich, Upper Bavaria, and as far from Greece as the Molucca Islands. | In the Iliad, Homer credits Daedalus both with a dance floor and the labyrinth. Kern speculates that labyrinth was a choros, which has the double meaning of dance and dance surface. Since no labyrinthine building in Crete survives, the depictions of labyrinths on coins may indicate the path of the dance rather than an architected structure. Though the Cretan labyrinth did not survive into the present, the maze dances based on it have. Theseus met the Minotaur in a Minoan maze, but he and his men immortalized that adventure in dance on the way back from their mission. As Miller explains, "on the island of Delos they performed a peculiar dance called the Geranos, or 'Crane Dane,' in which they went through the motions of threading the Labyrinth, and ... this dance was perpetuated by the natives of that island until fairly recently" (19). These dances have continued to be performed in Italy, Corfu, Munich, Upper Bavaria, and as far from Greece as the Molucca Islands. | ||
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The maze dance has not been forgotten in digital media. It may seem odd to think of ''Dance Dance Revolution'' as a maze game, but its arrows do show a labyrinthine path that the dancer, standing in place, is supposed to navigate. Missing a step is allowed, but the perfect performance will be as ritualized a motion through space as a ''Pac Man'' pattern. Diana Slattery has created a work called ''The Maze Game'' that brings together the maze as a site of meaningful dance. In her digital work and companion novel, moving through a lethal maze takes grace and “literacy,” since the maze is constructed out of glyphs from Slattery’s created visual language “glide.” Slattery’s work stands at the intersection of dance, maze, and narrative, but it is in figuring the maze as an utterance of a language that her work offers the most evocative exploration of mazes as semiotic systems in which communication and literacy are dependent on navigation. In its own way, 10 PRINT also functions at this juncture, a means of evoking literacy by compelling the user, learning to program, to trace the path of its execution and determine how it accomplishes its effect. | The maze dance has not been forgotten in digital media. It may seem odd to think of ''Dance Dance Revolution'' as a maze game, but its arrows do show a labyrinthine path that the dancer, standing in place, is supposed to navigate. Missing a step is allowed, but the perfect performance will be as ritualized a motion through space as a ''Pac Man'' pattern. Diana Slattery has created a work called ''The Maze Game'' that brings together the maze as a site of meaningful dance. In her digital work and companion novel, moving through a lethal maze takes grace and “literacy,” since the maze is constructed out of glyphs from Slattery’s created visual language “glide.” Slattery’s work stands at the intersection of dance, maze, and narrative, but it is in figuring the maze as an utterance of a language that her work offers the most evocative exploration of mazes as semiotic systems in which communication and literacy are dependent on navigation. In its own way, 10 PRINT also functions at this juncture, a means of evoking literacy by compelling the user, learning to program, to trace the path of its execution and determine how it accomplishes its effect. | ||
| − | + | Maze in dance illuminates the relationship between the unicursal path of a program and the multicursal possibilities for programmers. The choreographer’s multi-dimensional vision is invoked, interpreted, and performed by bodies in motion through space. The canvas takes shape in world where there are many choices about how to move; the dancers on stage, “in performance,” run through this world from beginning to end as though moving through a unicursal, fully plotted path. The labyrinth becomes multicursal for dancers when the plot thickens with improvisation. | |
| − | === Mazes in Mass Media === | ||
| − | |||
| − | The cultural resonance of mazes can be seen in numerous maze-based movies. According to Clifford Pickover, the first major one of these was aptly called ''The Maze,'' and was 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'' (1980). The Internet Movie Database lists 33 films, television shows, and videogames with the word “maze” in their title, including a 1929 melodrama, ''The Devil’s Maze,'' and the 1916 film, ''The Purple Maze.'' And there more than 100 motion pictures and videogames whose titles contain “Labyrinth” -- not just the famous movie with David Bowie. | ||
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| − | In the 1980s as adolescent boys and some adolescent girls busied themselves with 24-sided dice, a made-for-TV movie, ''Mazes and Monsters'' (1982), 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. The movie spoke to both the moral panic around ''Dungeons & Dragons'' and showcased the relationship between that game and the maze motif. It suggested that an (evidently) harmless maze within a game could become the threatening and potentially fatal maze that, in legend, Theseus faced. | ||
| − | |||
| − | ## Can this be integrated into a discussion of the cultural perception of the maze? What does it prove that movies mention mazes / have "maze" in their title? | ||
=== Experimentation === | === Experimentation === | ||
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The first maze constructed for rats by researchers was built in the late 1890s -- but, intriguingly, it was not for testing the creatures. Willard Small of Clark University built a maze environment to allow rats to eat and exercise when they ''weren't'' taking part in experiments. Small wanted the environment to simulate the burrows that rats inhabited in nature, but he modeled the first laboratory rat maze "after the Hampton Court Palace maze, a trapezoidal hedge maze that dates in its present form to 1690 but was probably built in the early sixteenth century by the first owner of the palace, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey" (Lemov 2005, p. 25). The maze was for restorative purposes quite consonant with the purposes for which the Hampton Court Palace maze was built. | The first maze constructed for rats by researchers was built in the late 1890s -- but, intriguingly, it was not for testing the creatures. Willard Small of Clark University built a maze environment to allow rats to eat and exercise when they ''weren't'' taking part in experiments. Small wanted the environment to simulate the burrows that rats inhabited in nature, but he modeled the first laboratory rat maze "after the Hampton Court Palace maze, a trapezoidal hedge maze that dates in its present form to 1690 but was probably built in the early sixteenth century by the first owner of the palace, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey" (Lemov 2005, p. 25). The maze was for restorative purposes quite consonant with the purposes for which the Hampton Court Palace maze was built. | ||
| − | But John B. Watson used maze enviornments for quite different purposes. He sought to determine whether rats could make their way through a maze under different conditions. Watson continued his work by systematically blinding rats and maiming them in other ways to deprive them of different senses after they had learned their way through a maze. His work attracted public attention, and he was denounced in a ''New York Times'' editorial as a torturer. Watson, however, was sure of his behavioral science agenda and that the same principles that applied to rats applied to people. By 1916 he had moved on to experiments with infants. In a 1920 experiment that became famous he conditioned one baby, "Little Albert," to fear a furry white rat and furry white things in general. The use of mazes in experiments with rats increased greatly during the 1920s. We now associate behaviorism, the perspective that all animal and human actions are behaviors, mainly with another American scientist, B. F. Skinner. Skinner's operant conditioning chamber, also known as the Skinner box, is another famous environment for laboratory animals that was built decades after Watson's mazes. While Skinner's name is better known today, Watson's maze remains emblematic -- and similar environments are still used for experiments today. | + | But John B. Watson used maze environments for quite different purposes. He sought to determine whether rats could make their way through a maze under different conditions. Watson continued his work by systematically blinding rats and maiming them in other ways to deprive them of different senses after they had learned their way through a maze. His work attracted public attention, and he was denounced in a ''New York Times'' editorial as a torturer. Watson, however, was sure of his behavioral science agenda and that the same principles that applied to rats applied to people. By 1916 he had moved on to experiments with infants. In a 1920 experiment that became famous he conditioned one baby, "Little Albert," to fear a furry white rat and furry white things in general. The use of mazes in experiments with rats increased greatly during the 1920s. We now associate behaviorism, the perspective that all animal and human actions are behaviors, mainly with another American scientist, B. F. Skinner. Skinner's operant conditioning chamber, also known as the Skinner box, is another famous environment for laboratory animals that was built decades after Watson's mazes. While Skinner's name is better known today, Watson's maze remains emblematic -- and similar environments are still used for experiments today. |
In 1959, one of the earliest computer programs written for fun - an example of "recreational computing" - depicted an experimenter's maze. The program, which is possibly the first computer program to draw a maze of any sort, was written for the TX-0 at MIT by Douglas T. Ross and John E. Ward. The TX-0 was an experimental computer that, when loaned out from MIT's Lincoln Laboratories, provided one of the first opportunities for people to program when not working on an official project. It also allowed programmers to work on the machine interactively, much as Commodore 64 programmers later would, rather than submitting batch jobs in the form of decks of punched cards. In the program that became known as "Mouse in the Maze," a mouse would move through a maze, eating cheese. The mouse could also consume martinis, which would cause it to become disoriented. Here, the environment implemented was not the hedge maze of diversion and fun, but a more staid experimenter's maze. This was then made playful by the implementation of an amusing reward for the mouse and the simulation of appropriate behavior. | In 1959, one of the earliest computer programs written for fun - an example of "recreational computing" - depicted an experimenter's maze. The program, which is possibly the first computer program to draw a maze of any sort, was written for the TX-0 at MIT by Douglas T. Ross and John E. Ward. The TX-0 was an experimental computer that, when loaned out from MIT's Lincoln Laboratories, provided one of the first opportunities for people to program when not working on an official project. It also allowed programmers to work on the machine interactively, much as Commodore 64 programmers later would, rather than submitting batch jobs in the form of decks of punched cards. In the program that became known as "Mouse in the Maze," a mouse would move through a maze, eating cheese. The mouse could also consume martinis, which would cause it to become disoriented. Here, the environment implemented was not the hedge maze of diversion and fun, but a more staid experimenter's maze. This was then made playful by the implementation of an amusing reward for the mouse and the simulation of appropriate behavior. | ||
