Mazes

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The first definition describes one particular type of puzzling network; the second, more metaphorical, allows us to name mazes representations of paths with certain characteristics. In popular use, the term’s meaning has been stretched to cover intellectual puzzles, tangled legal code, and confusing, labyrinthine situations, such as the one Alonso refers to near the end of ''The Tempest.'' 10 PRINT's output, by representing a maze, can suggest many different things.

−

10 PRINT fits some of the criteria that William Henry Matthews establishes for mazes in his definitive ''Mazes and Labyrinths'' (1922): they are "works of artifice,” not "'labyrinths’ of nature, such as forests, caverns, and so forth; they are endowed with "an element of purposefulness in the design" (182); and betray "a certain degree of complexity" (183). Finally he requires "communication" among the maze’s component parts and between its "interior and exterior" (183).

+

10 PRINT meets some of the criteria that William Henry Matthews establishes for mazes in his definitive ''Mazes and Labyrinths'' (1922): they are "works of artifice,” not "'labyrinths’ of nature, such as forests, caverns, and so forth; they are endowed with "an element of purposefulness in the design" (182); and betray "a certain degree of complexity" (183). Finally he requires "communication" among the maze’s component parts and between its "interior and exterior" (183).

−

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, 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.

+

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, 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 gaps 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.

−

A material, architectural structure is necessarially of finite size. There is no limit to how long 10 PRINT can be left running, however. Can a boundless structure be a maze? There is a very early warrant that it can, found in one of the example sentences from the ''Oxford English Dictionary''': "1542 H. BRINKELOW Lamentacion sig. Cviii, Leadyng them in an endlesse Maze of dyrtye tradicyons and folish ceremonyes." As an endless maze, 10 PRINT tantalizes viewers, but offers no set path or solution, which is quite in keeping with the definition of "maze" given by ''Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary'' (1913): "a confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth."

+

A material, architectural structure is necessarially of finite size. There is no limit to how long 10 PRINT can be left running, however. Can a boundless structure be a maze? There is a very early warrant that it can, found in one of the example sentences from the ''Oxford English Dictionary'': "1542 H. BRINKELOW Lamentacion sig. Cviii, Leadyng them in an endlesse Maze of dyrtye tradicyons and folish ceremonyes." As an endless maze, 10 PRINT tantalizes viewers, but offers no set path or solution, which is quite in keeping with the definition of "maze" given by ''Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary'' (1913): "a confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth."

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 bounded 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.

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For children over the centuries, unicursal hedge and turf mazes have offered curling lanes for running but less puzzling pleasures than the seemingly endless grounds for playing hide-and-seek out of doors in multicursal mazes. For in multicursal mazes, which are solvable mazes, the solution is complicated by the possibility of making wrong choices at key nodes where directional choices are required. Instead of following the unicursal maze’s predetermined path, walkers in a multicursal maze risk getting lost on their way. They are challenged to find the path that reaches the exit. Once that path is known, though, the one correct path can be seen as a unicursal maze that is fraught by the possibility of wrong turns.

−

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: 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.

=== Death and Danger ===

From Maze

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@@ Line 39: / Line 39: @@
 The first definition describes one particular type of puzzling network; the second, more metaphorical, allows us to name mazes representations of paths with certain characteristics. In popular use, the term’s meaning has been stretched to cover intellectual puzzles, tangled legal code, and confusing, labyrinthine situations, such as the one Alonso refers to near the end of ''The Tempest.'' 10 PRINT's output, by representing a maze, can suggest many different things.
-PRINT fits some of the criteria that William Henry Matthews establishes for mazes in his definitive ''Mazes and Labyrinths'' (1922): they are "works of artifice,” not "'labyrinths’ of nature, such as forests, caverns, and so forth; they are endowed with "an element of purposefulness in the design" (182); and betray "a certain degree of complexity" (183). Finally he requires "communication" among the maze’s component parts and between its "interior and exterior" (183).
+PRINT meets some of the criteria that William Henry Matthews establishes for mazes in his definitive ''Mazes and Labyrinths'' (1922): they are "works of artifice,” not "'labyrinths’ of nature, such as forests, caverns, and so forth; they are endowed with "an element of purposefulness in the design" (182); and betray "a certain degree of complexity" (183). Finally he requires "communication" among the maze’s component parts and between its "interior and exterior" (183).
-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, 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.
+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, 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 gaps 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.
-A material, architectural structure is necessarially of finite size. There is no limit to how long 10 PRINT can be left running, however. Can a boundless structure be a maze? There is a very early warrant that it can, found in one of the example sentences from the ''Oxford English Dictionary''': "1542 H. BRINKELOW Lamentacion sig. Cviii, Leadyng them in an endlesse Maze of dyrtye tradicyons and folish ceremonyes." As an endless maze, 10 PRINT tantalizes viewers, but offers no set path or solution, which is quite in keeping with the definition of "maze" given by ''Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary'' (1913): "a confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth."
+A material, architectural structure is necessarially of finite size. There is no limit to how long 10 PRINT can be left running, however. Can a boundless structure be a maze? There is a very early warrant that it can, found in one of the example sentences from the ''Oxford English Dictionary'': "1542 H. BRINKELOW Lamentacion sig. Cviii, Leadyng them in an endlesse Maze of dyrtye tradicyons and folish ceremonyes." As an endless maze, 10 PRINT tantalizes viewers, but offers no set path or solution, which is quite in keeping with the definition of "maze" given by ''Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary'' (1913): "a confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth."
 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 bounded 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.
@@ Line 49: / Line 49: @@
 For children over the centuries, unicursal hedge and turf mazes have offered curling lanes for running but less puzzling pleasures than the seemingly endless grounds for playing hide-and-seek out of doors in multicursal mazes. For in multicursal mazes, which are solvable mazes, the solution is complicated by the possibility of making wrong choices at key nodes where directional choices are required. Instead of following the unicursal maze’s predetermined path, walkers in a multicursal maze risk getting lost on their way. They are challenged to find the path that reaches the exit. Once that path is known, though, the one correct path can be seen as a unicursal maze that is fraught by the possibility of wrong turns.
-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: 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.
 === Death and Danger ===