Mazes

When 10 PRINT runs, it relentlessly provides a maze, but it does not not trap the user in it like a rat. Instead, given the top-down view and the lack of a user-controlled maze walker, the computer may be offering to collaborate with the user in experimenting on virtual rats. This would be a different suggestion than the cinematic, literary, and cartoon representation of behavioral science mazes that encourage people to identify with the rat or mouse. In any case, amid the playful and religious connotations of the maze are those things the experimenter's maze hints at: That the computer is a scientific instrument, for instance, and that the recent history of science has certain dark corners.

When 10 PRINT runs, it relentlessly provides a maze, but it does not not trap the user in it like a rat. Instead, given the top-down view and the lack of a user-controlled maze walker, the computer may be offering to collaborate with the user in experimenting on virtual rats. This would be a different suggestion than the cinematic, literary, and cartoon representation of behavioral science mazes that encourage people to identify with the rat or mouse. In any case, amid the playful and religious connotations of the maze are those things the experimenter's maze hints at: That the computer is a scientific instrument, for instance, and that the recent history of science has certain dark corners.

A clear line can be drawn from the physical and visual mazes of earlier times to the mazes of the digital age. It is here, in the computer culture that has arisen in the past thirty years, that mazes once again become part of daily life. With the arrival of the computer in the 1960s and graphical displays in the 1970s, the maze has entered a kind of renaissance. There are two important developments that contributed to the prevalence of the maze as a cultural production: (1) the ability to easily generate complete maze-like structures on a screen or, with older computers, printed output; and (2) the appearance of procedural mazes, that is, mazes traversed not through physically walking through space nor through tracing a pencil on a page, but through navigating representations of convoluted virtual space that are generated by mathematical algorithm.

A clear line can be drawn from the physical and visual mazes of earlier times to the mazes of the digital age. It is here, in the computer culture that has arisen in the past thirty years, that mazes once again become part of daily life. With the arrival of the computer in the 1960s and graphical displays in the 1970s, the maze has entered a kind of renaissance. There are two important developments that contributed to the prevalence of the maze as a cultural production: (1) the ability to easily generate complete maze-like structures on a screen or, with older computers, printed output; and (2) the appearance of procedural mazes, that is, mazes traversed not through physically walking through space nor through tracing a pencil on a page, but through navigating representations of convoluted virtual space that are generated by mathematical algorithm.