Mazes

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=== Death and Danger ===

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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 with him, only to abandon him (in most tellings of the legend) on the island of Naxos.

+

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 with him, only to abandon her (in most tellings of the legend) on the island of Naxos.

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) too long to describe in any detail here. Suffice it to say the depictions of the Cretan labyrinth as a dark, complex structure (see Ovid via Doob) and the need for a pointer toward the entrance, 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. Even an experienced programmer can benefit from a one-line thread like 10 PRINT.

−

In a sense, then, Theseus’s adventure at Knossos involves the metamorphosis of an effectively multicursal maze to unicursal maze, which itself reflects the change in experience from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, reasonable, and tamed. It also illustrates how some puzzles have sequential solutions: it was not enough for Theseus to kill the Minotaur; he had to find an exit from the labyrinth afterwards. The story of Hansel and Gretel shows that bread crumbs don’t always solve the problem of finding one's way back home; they may not have solved the Cretan problem. Finally, this original labyrinthine myth reflects the reality of many puzzles: when the solution is known, the puzzle seems simpler if not trivial. The pleasure of finding one more, perhaps more efficient, effortless, more elegant, or faster solution can compel players to continue working at puzzles, however. The morphing of the maze from complex to simple (or at least understandable) is part of the Commodore 64 user's ideal encounter with 10 PRINT, and it is what allows this puzzle to lead on to other explorations and different routes.

+

In a sense, then, Theseus’s adventure at Knossos involves the metamorphosis of an effectively multicursal maze to a unicursal maze, which itself reflects the change in experience from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, reasonable, and tamed. It also illustrates how some puzzles have sequential solutions: it was not enough for Theseus to kill the Minotaur; he had to find an exit from the labyrinth afterwards. The story of Hansel and Gretel shows that bread crumbs don’t always solve the problem of finding one's way back home; they may not have solved the Cretan problem. Finally, this original labyrinthine myth reflects the reality of many puzzles: when the solution is known, the puzzle seems simpler if not trivial. The pleasure of finding one more, perhaps more efficient, effortless, more elegant, or faster solution can compel players to continue working at puzzles, however. The morphing of the maze from complex to simple (or at least understandable) is part of the Commodore 64 user's ideal encounter with 10 PRINT, and it is what allows this puzzle to lead on to other explorations and different routes.

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 his or her own.

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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.

−

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 mythological; 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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@@ Line 53: / Line 53: @@
 === 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 with him, only to abandon him (in most tellings of the legend) on the island of Naxos.
+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 with him, only to abandon her (in most tellings of the legend) on the island of Naxos.
 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) too long to describe in any detail here. Suffice it to say the depictions of the Cretan labyrinth as a dark, complex structure (see Ovid via Doob) and the need for a pointer toward the entrance, 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.  Even an experienced programmer can benefit from a one-line thread like 10 PRINT.
-In a sense, then, Theseus’s adventure at Knossos involves the metamorphosis of an effectively multicursal maze to unicursal maze, which itself reflects the change in experience from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, reasonable, and tamed. It also illustrates how some puzzles have sequential solutions: it was not enough for Theseus to kill the Minotaur; he had to find an exit from the labyrinth afterwards. The story of Hansel and Gretel shows that bread crumbs don’t always solve the problem of finding one's way back home; they may not have solved the Cretan problem. Finally, this original labyrinthine myth reflects the reality of many puzzles: when the solution is known, the puzzle seems simpler if not trivial. The pleasure of finding one more, perhaps more efficient, effortless, more elegant, or faster solution can compel players to continue working at puzzles, however. The morphing of the maze from complex to simple (or at least understandable) is part of the Commodore 64 user's ideal encounter with 10 PRINT, and it is what allows this puzzle to lead on to other explorations and different routes.
+In a sense, then, Theseus’s adventure at Knossos involves the metamorphosis of an effectively multicursal maze to a unicursal maze, which itself reflects the change in experience from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, reasonable, and tamed. It also illustrates how some puzzles have sequential solutions: it was not enough for Theseus to kill the Minotaur; he had to find an exit from the labyrinth afterwards. The story of Hansel and Gretel shows that bread crumbs don’t always solve the problem of finding one's way back home; they may not have solved the Cretan problem. Finally, this original labyrinthine myth reflects the reality of many puzzles: when the solution is known, the puzzle seems simpler if not trivial. The pleasure of finding one more, perhaps more efficient, effortless, more elegant, or faster solution can compel players to continue working at puzzles, however. The morphing of the maze from complex to simple (or at least understandable) is part of the Commodore 64 user's ideal encounter with 10 PRINT, and it is what allows this puzzle to lead on to other explorations and different routes.
 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 his or her own.
@@ Line 63: / Line 63: @@
 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.
-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 mythological; no ruins of the edifice remain. Yet the telling of this myth includes a pattern that, as Matthews notes, became convention over the centuries:
 <blockquote>