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 diagonal lines it surely would not be as interesting to execute, to understand, and to discuss this program. The Maze then becomes the central visual trope used to read 10 PRINT's output.

10 PRINT is, indeed, a complex work of artifice. Ironically -- and Matthews could hardly have foreseen this -- the compelling and captivating quality of 10 PRINT is due to the lack of an obvious Daedalus, a purposeful designer. Someone wrote the line of code, certainly, but that human artificer of the program is not credited. The particular pattern that is produced is due entirely to the RND function in BASIC, which is also by some anonymous author and was designed to be unpredictable. Furthermore, in 10 PRINT, communication among the component parts is established by the regularities of the “blank” spaces between slashes, which in the aggregate also establishes a sense of inside and out that is rather more muddled than in the cases that Matthews discusses.

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, 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 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.

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.

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.

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 to fulfill their plan. 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 exhilarating is “running” the maze. This way of encountering the maze was carried into video games such as ''Doom'' and ''Pac-Man'' In a different way, the cascading display that results from running 10 PRINT offers some of the playful zig-zagging of 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. It has been attributed historically to Christopher Wren as Daedalus, though 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).

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.

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 sense of labyrinth as a set of constrained enacted movements, another connection with 10 PRINT arises as the programmer becomes dancer. The novice programmer prepares to face the minotaur Commodore PET, (half-companion, half-machine) with only one line of code as a clue leading to safety. Treading that line across the keyboard, the technoTheseus travels safely through the convolutions of code by staying true to each symbol. Though that ritual seems to produce an aporia, the careful adherence to the path ultimately leads to mastery. At the same time, like the maze dance, it is in tracing this labyrinth, that its very corridors are created -- daunting hallways where PETSCII numbers obfuscate graphical elements and a simple loop conceals and endless string of instructions. To type the precious few characters of 10 PRINT and then to be amazed by its output is to participate in the creation of that wonder, to enact that dance that establishes the maze. It is in typing the line and executing the code that the programmer comes into contact with the mystery of concision in code and will thereafter be even more tantalized by the opportunity to build such a clever maze.

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.

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 cites 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). Pickover later adds an followup note from Pullen about a maze he had generated with "@2 miles of passages" that "stretched over 3031 pages" (8).

Some formulation of Moore's Law, which in its first formulation describes how the number of transistors on a chip doubes every 18 months, could surely apply to describe the continual increase in the area of single-solution computer-generated mazes. In the more general space of convoluted structures, solvable or not, the quest for the largest computer-generated maze will always be chasing 10 PRINT, whose never-ending corridors can be drawn with a one-line reductio ad absurdum.