Mazes

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--Alonso, The Tempest (3.3.1)

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Whether or not the 10 PRINT pattern displayed on the screen is solvable at every instant, it was consistently identified as a maze in the early 1980s. The output of 10 PRINT was called a maze from the program's first appearance in print. 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). The programmer who submitted the one-line version found in ''Run'' also described it as "drawing a continuous maze" (13). 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 is the central visual trope used to read 10 PRINT's output, and it is a trope that has been heavily coded over the centuries.

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Whether or not the 10 PRINT pattern displayed on the screen is solvable at every instant, it was consistently identified as a maze in the early 1980s. 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). The programmer who submitted the one-line version found in ''Run'' also described it as "drawing a continuous maze" (13). 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 is the central visual trope used to read 10 PRINT's output, and it is a trope that has been heavily coded over the centuries.

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Cryptic, compelling, and cabalistic, the maze invites many modes of interpretation and understanding. Mazes can pique our curiosity and elicit a range of emotions: amusement, excitement, confusion, trepidation, calm, and hopelessness. They are approachable as visual objects, as textual artifacts, and as horticultural and architectonic spaces. A full account of the cultural significance of mazes would need to traverse the fields of art, history, literature, religion, architecture, and even music and dance. This chapter makes no pretense of offering a comprehensive account of what mazes mean. (For in-depth historical accounts of mazes and labyrinths, see Doob, 1990; Kern, 2000; and Matthews, 1922.) Rather, it highlights those mazes and representations of mazes throughout history that bear on what Commodore 64 users in the 1980s would plausibly associate with the output they saw after running 10 PRINT.

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Cryptic, compelling, and cabalistic, the maze invites many modes of interpretation and understanding. Mazes can pique our curiosity and elicit a range of emotions: amusement, excitement, confusion, trepidation, calm, and hopelessness. They are approachable as visual objects, as textual artifacts, and as horticultural and architectural spaces. A full account of the cultural significance of mazes would need to traverse the fields of art, history, literature, religion, architecture, and even music and dance. This chapter makes no pretense of offering a comprehensive account of what mazes mean. (For in-depth historical accounts of mazes and labyrinths, see Doob, 1990; Kern, 2000; and Matthews, 1922.) Rather, it highlights those mazes and representations of mazes throughout history that bear on what Commodore 64 users in the 1980s would plausibly associate with the output they saw after running 10 PRINT.

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Whether situated as amusing puzzles, places of terror, guides to movement, behavioral proving grounds, or invitations to contemplative meanderings, the maze’s meanings (certainly in the Unites States and in much of the West) date back to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Knossos, a bewildering and life-threatening space. Mazes have since appeared on coins, on walls, and in spiritual centers. Hedge-row mazes have presented public, shared diversions. In more recent times, mazes have served as spaces for movement and dance and as commonplace diversions in puzzle-books. Sometimes, mazes are abstract mathematical objects or scientific tools for studying animal behavior. And in computer games, the maze takes on an archetypal, structural frame for adventure, chase, and combat.

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Whether situated as amusing puzzles, places of terror, guides to movement, behavioral proving grounds, or invitations to contemplative meanderings, the maze’s meanings (certainly in the Unites States and in much of the West) date back to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Knossos, a bewildering and life-threatening space. In more recent times, mazes have served as spaces for movement and dance and as commonplace diversions in puzzle-books. Sometimes, mazes are abstract mathematical objects or scientific tools for studying animal behavior. And in computer games, the maze takes on an archetypal, structural frame for adventure, chase, and combat.

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Indeed, the computer has provided new ways of experiencing mazes, and yet in many ways the maze is also iconic of the personal computer and programming. The novice at the command line faces a black screen that can seem frighteningly empty or like the perfect tool for creating corridors and puzzles. By considering how 10 PRINT relates to the cultural history of mazes, it is possible to understand more about what 10 PRINT's maze means, and what makes this program inviting to try out and to modify.

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Indeed, the computer has provided new ways of experiencing mazes, and yet in many ways the maze is also iconic of personal computing and programming. The novice at the command line faces a black screen that can seem frighteningly empty or like the perfect tool for creating corridors and puzzles. By considering how 10 PRINT relates to the cultural history of mazes, it is possible to understand more about what 10 PRINT's maze means, and what makes this program inviting to try out and to modify.

=== Maze vs. Labyrinth (Sidebar) ===

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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.

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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."

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A material, architectural structure is necessarily of finite size. There is no limit to how long 10 PRINT can be left running, however. 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 the mazes contemplated are 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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=== 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 child of Pasiphae’s cursed by Poseidon with an unnatural bovine lust. 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 could follow it back to the entrance. Thanks to Ariadne's thread, Theseus successfully made his way through the maze, slew the Minotaur, and escaped. The victorious Greek hero took Ariadne with him, only to abandon her (in most tellings of the legend) on the island of Naxos.

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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 child of Pasiphae’s cursed by Poseidon with an unnatural bovine lust. This early maze, like a basement or attic in Gothic literature, 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 could follow it back to the entrance. Thanks to Ariadne's thread, Theseus successfully made his way through the maze, slew the Minotaur, and escaped. The victorious Greek hero took Ariadne with him, only to abandon her (in most tellings of the legend) on the island of Naxos.

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Theseus’ success depended on this “clue” (from “clewe”), a skein of yarn “employed to guide any one in ‘threading’ his way into or out of a labyrinth” (OED). The need for this clue seems to 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. 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 its depictions, the Cretan maze is formalized and re-produced not as an unknown space but as Theseus’ path through it. This transformation from multicursal and unknowable passageway to marked and bounded pathway reflects the transformation that comes in the mastery of any system, from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, mapped, 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. Finally, therefore, this original labyrinthine myth reflects the reality of many puzzles: when the solution is known, the puzzle seems simpler if not trivial. 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.

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As more and more pagan and secular mazes emerged alongside church and other labyrinth traditions, they retained some of their profound, sacred nature while also offering puzzle-play and leisure.

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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. The Daedalus of this maze has been said to be Christopher Wren, 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).

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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. The Daedalus of this maze has been said to be Christopher Wren, 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).

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.

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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 Crane Dance is just one of many ancient labyrinthine dances. Several Roman writers, including Virgil, Suetonius, and Tacitus, recount a "Game of Troy" or simply "Troja", which is described sometimes as a ritual around a grave site and at other times as a kind of formal demonstration performed by youths, perhaps a sort of military review. Other labyrinthine dances appear as part of an exclusion right, in which "movements ....are intended to weave a magical entanglement and spread a field of magical force to exclude all that is not wanted to enter the guarded place" (Knight qtd. in Bord)". Still more appear to be tied to rites of spring.

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The Crane Dance is just one of many ancient labyrinthine dances. Several Roman writers, including Virgil, Suetonius, and Tacitus, recount a "Game of Troy" or simply "Troja", which is described sometimes as a ritual around a grave site and at other times as a kind of formal demonstration performed by youths, perhaps a sort of military review. Other labyrinthine dances appear as part of an exclusion right, in which "movements ....are intended to weave a magical entanglement and spread a field of magical force to exclude all that is not wanted to enter the guarded place" (Knight qtd. in Bord). Still more appear to be tied to rites of spring.

In the Twentieth Century, Martha Graham adapted the motifs of the Cretan maze story in “Errand into a Maze” (1949). In this adaptation, Ariadne is the one tapped by the minotaur. After contemplating her escape from the labyrinth represented by a rope on the floor, as Roberta E. Zlokower notes, “she breaks her pattern and breaks her tormentor. The maze of rope reflects the maze of her mind and the maze of the myth ...”

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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.

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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.

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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 he concluded 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.

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10 PRINT's output is a regular arrangement of "walls" in a grid -- akin to the arrangement of the stereotypical laboratory maze. Instead of suggesting that the computer is creating structures like an inspired Daedalus, the maze becomes metanymic of a challenge to intelligence; not a romantic, riddling intelligence, but a classically conditioned, animal kind. It also brings in the idea of the experimenter -- indifferent to the struggles of the creatures lost in the maze, at least, and perhaps cruelly impairing those creatures -- and the subject of the experiment, trapped in a bewildering structure created by powers and for purposes beyond comprehension.

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10 PRINT's output is a regular arrangement of "walls" in a grid -- akin to the arrangement of the stereotypical laboratory maze. Instead of suggesting that the computer is creating structures like an inspired Daedalus, the maze becomes metonymic of a challenge to intelligence; not a romantic, riddling intelligence, but a classically conditioned, animal kind. It also brings in the idea of the experimenter -- indifferent to the struggles of the creatures lost in the maze, at least, and perhaps cruelly impairing those creatures -- and the subject of the experiment, trapped in a bewildering structure created by powers and for purposes beyond comprehension.

But who is the user at the interface of 10 Print, the scientist or the rodent? When 10 PRINT runs, it relentlessly provides a maze, but it does not trap the user like a rat. Instead, given the top-down view and the lack of a user-controlled maze walker, the computer presents the programmer with the point of view of the maze designer, offering in a sense to collaborate with the user in creating a new design. As novice programmers can attest, however, making one’s way through the introductory steps of acquiring the syntax and structures can only pursue that whiff of cheese. In this way, 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 the role of the traveler slaying the beast to a hungry little mouse. This dehumanization continues in the next development as the mouse becomes mechanized.

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In the early 1950s the mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon designed a mechanical mouse that appeared to solve the same kind of maze a real mouse might be have been expected to navigate in one of Watson’s behavioral experiments. A foundational figure in modern computing, Shannon named the mouse Theseus, further reducing the mythological hero (and the sense of epic agency that story conveys), this time to a mere contraption guided by a mechanized system. Featured in both Time and Life in 1952, Theseus was not a sophisticated piece of artificial intelligence, however. It was simply a wooden mouse on wheels, with a bar magnet inside and copper wire whiskers. The true magic of this mouse resided underneath the maze, in a system of electronic relays that switched position when the mouse’s whiskers touched corresponding walls in the maze above. The first time through a maze, Theseus blundered randomly, propelled by its magnet, flipping the relays underneath the maze whenever it encountered a passage. The next time, Theseus would navigate the maze perfectly, thanks to the relays underneath, which recorded the correct route. This means of negotiating the twisting passages of Shannon’s maze was not mere novelty. As Time explained in 1952, Theseus was “useful in studying telephone switching systems, which are very like labyrinths.” Indeed, George Dyson argues that Theseus inspired the RAND Corporation engineer Paul Baran’s “adaptive message block switching” — the precursor to what is now known as packet switching, the protocol that defines the way data flows on the Internet (150).

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Aside from its significance to network computing, Theseus serves as a vivid example of an early connection between mazes and computers. Furthermore, Theseus shares a procedural resonance with 10 PRINT. Theseus “learned” through a repetitive process the fundamental process that draws the 10 PRINT maze. And like a computer program, the mouse in Shannon’s maze was only the surface level signifier of much deeper processes. Theseus in fact was dumb, inert. The “brain” of Theseus lay in the relays hidden underneath the surface of the maze, much in the same way the on-screen design of 10 PRINT is generated by an piece of code, initially not very clear, which depends upon an invisible, low-level call to generate pseudo-random numbers.

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Aside from its significance to network computing, Theseus serves as a vivid example of an early connection between mazes and computers. Furthermore, Theseus shares a procedural resonance with 10 PRINT. Theseus “learned” through repetition the fundamental process that draws the 10 PRINT maze. And like a computer program, the mouse in Shannon’s maze was only the surface level signifier of much deeper processes. Theseus in fact was dumb, inert. The “brain” of Theseus lay in the relays hidden underneath the surface of the maze, much in the same way the on-screen design of 10 PRINT is generated by an piece of code, initially not very clear, which depends upon an invisible, low-level call to generate pseudo-random numbers.

=== The Computerized Maze ===

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==== First Person Mazes ====

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A significant early maze program was the initially single-player ''Maze,'' which presented a 3D view of a maze in which a player can see (and shoot) opponents. This program was created in 1973 at the NASA Ames Research Center by Steve Colley and Howard Palmer and made into a multi-player game by Greg Thompson. The program then, in 1974, was brought to MIT and elaborated; Dave Lebling wrote a server that provided text messaging and supported up to eight players or robots. The same program was later ported to the Xerox Alto as ''Maze War.''

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A significant early maze program was the initially single-player ''Maze,'' which presented a 3D view of a maze in which a player can see (and shoot) opponents. This program was created in 1973 at the NASA Ames Research Center by Steve Colley and Howard Palmer and made into a multi-player game by Greg Thompson. The program then, in 1974, was brought to MIT and expanded; Dave Lebling wrote a server that provided text messaging and supported up to eight players or robots. The same program was later ported to the Xerox Alto as ''Maze War.''

In ''Maze,'' the environment was created for entertainment, but it was really a convoluted battlefield, not a space to be explored or solved and certainly not one, like the typical hedge maze, that would serve for non-violent diversion. The more terrifying maze environment became a staple of early home computer mazes. ''3D Monster Maze'' was an early example, developed in 1981 and released the following year on the Sinclair ZX81. The game uses character graphics and features a randomly generated 16x16 maze with a Tyrannosaurus Rex; the player can only flee from this opponent in attempting to exit the maze. ''Dungeons of Daggorath,'' programmed in 1980-1981 and also released in 1982, ran on the TRS-80 Color Computer, features a similar first-person perspective on a maze. While it does not generate different maze levels, it had various additional options for arming one's character and attacking enemies.

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====Second Person Mazes====

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Many of the earliest computer-presented mazes were not seen head -n or from above: They were presented in textual descriptions. Second-person mazes of a sort were found in early text-based games such as ''Hunt the Wumpus,'' a 1973 BASIC program by Gregory Yob. ''Hunt the Wumpus'' departed from the standard grid-based BASIC game by providing a playing field of a different topology, one that was a dodecahedron. The player stalked and was stalked by a wumpus opponent, much as the dinosaur would later pursue the player in ''3D Monster Maze.''

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Many of the earliest computer-presented mazes were not visual; they were described textually, narrated to the player from a second-person perspective. Second-person mazes of a sort were found in early text-based games such as ''Hunt the Wumpus,'' a 1973 BASIC program by Gregory Yob. ''Hunt the Wumpus'' departed from the standard grid-based BASIC game by providing a playing field of a different topology, one that was a dodecahedron. The player stalked and was stalked by a wumpus opponent, much as the dinosaur would later pursue the player in ''3D Monster Maze.''

Textually described mazes developed into their most complex and confusing configurations in text-based adventure games of the sort that are now called interactive fiction. The genre began with the groundbreaking ''Adventure'', written by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 in 1976 and later expanded by Don Woods into a full-fledged underground adventure. Basing the game in part on his own caving experience in the Mammoth Cave system, Crowther included the ten-room maze introduced with:

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  --Alonso, The Tempest (3.3.1)
-Whether or not the 10 PRINT pattern displayed on the screen is solvable at every instant, it was consistently identified as a maze in the early 1980s. The output of 10 PRINT was called a maze from the program's first appearance in print.  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). The programmer who submitted the one-line version found in ''Run'' also described it as "drawing a continuous maze" (13). 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 is the central visual trope used to read 10 PRINT's output, and it is a trope that has been heavily coded over the centuries.
+Whether or not the 10 PRINT pattern displayed on the screen is solvable at every instant, it was consistently identified as a maze in the early 1980s. 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). The programmer who submitted the one-line version found in ''Run'' also described it as "drawing a continuous maze" (13). 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 is the central visual trope used to read 10 PRINT's output, and it is a trope that has been heavily coded over the centuries.
-Cryptic, compelling, and cabalistic, the maze invites many modes of interpretation and understanding. Mazes can pique our curiosity and elicit a range of emotions: amusement, excitement, confusion, trepidation, calm, and hopelessness. They are approachable as visual objects, as textual artifacts, and as horticultural and architectonic spaces. A full account of the cultural significance of mazes would need to traverse the fields of art, history, literature, religion, architecture, and even music and dance. This chapter makes no pretense of offering a comprehensive account of what mazes mean. (For in-depth historical accounts of mazes and labyrinths, see Doob, 1990; Kern, 2000; and Matthews, 1922.) Rather, it highlights those mazes and representations of mazes throughout history that bear on what Commodore 64 users in the 1980s would plausibly associate with the output they saw after running 10 PRINT.
+Cryptic, compelling, and cabalistic, the maze invites many modes of interpretation and understanding. Mazes can pique our curiosity and elicit a range of emotions: amusement, excitement, confusion, trepidation, calm, and hopelessness. They are approachable as visual objects, as textual artifacts, and as horticultural and architectural spaces. A full account of the cultural significance of mazes would need to traverse the fields of art, history, literature, religion, architecture, and even music and dance. This chapter makes no pretense of offering a comprehensive account of what mazes mean. (For in-depth historical accounts of mazes and labyrinths, see Doob, 1990; Kern, 2000; and Matthews, 1922.) Rather, it highlights those mazes and representations of mazes throughout history that bear on what Commodore 64 users in the 1980s would plausibly associate with the output they saw after running 10 PRINT.
-Whether situated as amusing puzzles, places of terror, guides to movement, behavioral proving grounds, or invitations to contemplative meanderings, the maze’s meanings (certainly in the Unites States and in much of the West) date back to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Knossos, a bewildering and life-threatening space. Mazes have since appeared on coins, on walls, and in spiritual centers. Hedge-row mazes have presented public, shared diversions. In more recent times, mazes have served as spaces for movement and dance and as commonplace diversions in puzzle-books. Sometimes, mazes are abstract mathematical objects or scientific tools for studying animal behavior. And in computer games, the maze takes on an archetypal, structural frame for adventure, chase, and combat.
+Whether situated as amusing puzzles, places of terror, guides to movement, behavioral proving grounds, or invitations to contemplative meanderings, the maze’s meanings (certainly in the Unites States and in much of the West) date back to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Knossos, a bewildering and life-threatening space. In more recent times, mazes have served as spaces for movement and dance and as commonplace diversions in puzzle-books. Sometimes, mazes are abstract mathematical objects or scientific tools for studying animal behavior. And in computer games, the maze takes on an archetypal, structural frame for adventure, chase, and combat.
-Indeed, the computer has provided new ways of experiencing mazes, and yet in many ways the maze is also iconic of the personal computer and programming. The novice at the command line faces a black screen that can seem frighteningly empty or like the perfect tool for creating corridors and puzzles.  By considering how 10 PRINT relates to the cultural history of mazes, it is possible to understand more about what 10 PRINT's maze means, and what makes this program inviting to try out and to modify.
+Indeed, the computer has provided new ways of experiencing mazes, and yet in many ways the maze is also iconic of personal computing and programming. The novice at the command line faces a black screen that can seem frighteningly empty or like the perfect tool for creating corridors and puzzles.  By considering how 10 PRINT relates to the cultural history of mazes, it is possible to understand more about what 10 PRINT's maze means, and what makes this program inviting to try out and to modify.
 === Maze vs. Labyrinth (Sidebar) ===
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 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 necessarily of finite size. There is no limit to how long 10 PRINT can be left running, however. 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 the mazes contemplated are 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 46: / Line 46: @@
 === 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 child of Pasiphae’s cursed by Poseidon with an unnatural bovine lust. 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 could follow it back to the entrance. Thanks to Ariadne's thread, Theseus successfully made his way through the maze, slew the Minotaur, and escaped. The victorious Greek hero took Ariadne with him, only to abandon her (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 child of Pasiphae’s cursed by Poseidon with an unnatural bovine lust. This early maze, like a basement or attic in Gothic literature, 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 could follow it back to the entrance. Thanks to Ariadne's thread, Theseus successfully made his way through the maze, slew the Minotaur, and escaped. The victorious Greek hero took Ariadne with him, only to abandon her (in most tellings of the legend) on the island of Naxos.
-Theseus’ success depended on this “clue” (from “clewe”), a skein of yarn “employed to guide any one in ‘threading’ his way into or out of a labyrinth” (OED).  The need for this clue seems to 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. 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 its depictions, the Cretan maze is formalized and re-produced not as an unknown space but as Theseus’ path through it.  This transformation from multicursal and unknowable passageway to marked and bounded pathway reflects the transformation that comes in the mastery of any system, from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, mapped, 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. Finally, therefore, this original labyrinthine myth reflects the reality of many puzzles: when the solution is known, the puzzle seems simpler if not trivial. 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.
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 As more and more pagan and secular mazes emerged alongside church and other labyrinth traditions, they retained some of their profound, sacred nature while also offering puzzle-play and leisure.
-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. The Daedalus of this maze has been said to be Christopher Wren, 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).
+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. The Daedalus of this maze has been said to be Christopher Wren, 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).
 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.
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 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.
-The Crane Dance is just one of many ancient labyrinthine dances. Several Roman writers, including Virgil, Suetonius, and Tacitus, recount a "Game of Troy" or simply "Troja", which is described sometimes as a ritual around a grave site and at other times as a kind of formal demonstration performed by youths, perhaps a sort of military review. Other labyrinthine dances appear as part of an exclusion right, in which "movements ....are intended to weave a magical entanglement and spread a field of magical force to exclude all that is not wanted to enter the guarded place" (Knight qtd. in Bord)". Still more appear to be tied to rites of spring.
+The Crane Dance is just one of many ancient labyrinthine dances. Several Roman writers, including Virgil, Suetonius, and Tacitus, recount a "Game of Troy" or simply "Troja", which is described sometimes as a ritual around a grave site and at other times as a kind of formal demonstration performed by youths, perhaps a sort of military review. Other labyrinthine dances appear as part of an exclusion right, in which "movements ....are intended to weave a magical entanglement and spread a field of magical force to exclude all that is not wanted to enter the guarded place" (Knight qtd. in Bord). Still more appear to be tied to rites of spring.
 In the Twentieth Century, Martha Graham adapted the motifs of the Cretan maze story in “Errand into a Maze” (1949).  In this adaptation, Ariadne is the one tapped by the minotaur.  After contemplating her escape from the labyrinth represented by a rope on the floor, as Roberta E. Zlokower notes, “she breaks her pattern and breaks her tormentor. The maze of rope reflects the maze of her mind and the maze of the myth ...”
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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.
-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.
+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 he concluded 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.
-PRINT's output is a regular arrangement of "walls" in a grid -- akin to the arrangement of the stereotypical laboratory maze. Instead of suggesting that the computer is creating structures like an inspired Daedalus, the maze becomes metanymic of a challenge to intelligence; not a romantic, riddling intelligence, but a classically conditioned, animal kind. It also brings in the idea of the experimenter -- indifferent to the struggles of the creatures lost in the maze, at least, and perhaps cruelly impairing those creatures -- and the subject of the experiment, trapped in a bewildering structure created by powers and for purposes beyond comprehension.
+PRINT's output is a regular arrangement of "walls" in a grid -- akin to the arrangement of the stereotypical laboratory maze. Instead of suggesting that the computer is creating structures like an inspired Daedalus, the maze becomes metonymic of a challenge to intelligence; not a romantic, riddling intelligence, but a classically conditioned, animal kind. It also brings in the idea of the experimenter -- indifferent to the struggles of the creatures lost in the maze, at least, and perhaps cruelly impairing those creatures -- and the subject of the experiment, trapped in a bewildering structure created by powers and for purposes beyond comprehension.
 But who is the user at the interface of 10 Print, the scientist or the rodent?  When 10 PRINT runs, it relentlessly provides a maze, but it does not trap the user like a rat. Instead, given the top-down view and the lack of a user-controlled maze walker, the computer presents the programmer with the point of view of the maze designer, offering in a sense to collaborate with the user in creating a new design.  As novice programmers can attest, however, making one’s way through the introductory steps of acquiring the syntax and structures can only pursue that whiff of cheese.  In this way, 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 the role of the traveler slaying the beast to a hungry little mouse.  This dehumanization continues in the next development as the mouse becomes mechanized.
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 In the early 1950s the mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon designed a mechanical mouse that appeared to solve the same kind of maze a real mouse might be have been expected to navigate in one of Watson’s behavioral experiments. A foundational figure in modern computing, Shannon named the mouse Theseus, further reducing the mythological hero (and the sense of epic agency that story conveys), this time to a mere contraption guided by a mechanized system. Featured in both Time and Life in 1952, Theseus was not a sophisticated piece of artificial intelligence, however. It was simply a wooden mouse on wheels, with a bar magnet inside and copper wire whiskers. The true magic of this mouse resided underneath the maze, in a system of electronic relays that switched position when the mouse’s whiskers touched corresponding walls in the maze above. The first time through a maze, Theseus blundered randomly, propelled by its magnet, flipping the relays  underneath the maze whenever it encountered a passage. The next time, Theseus  would navigate the maze perfectly, thanks to the relays underneath, which   recorded the correct route. This means of negotiating the twisting passages of  Shannon’s maze was not mere novelty. As Time explained in 1952, Theseus was  “useful in studying telephone switching systems, which are very like  labyrinths.” Indeed, George Dyson argues that Theseus inspired the RAND  Corporation engineer Paul Baran’s “adaptive message block switching” — the  precursor to what is now known as packet switching, the protocol that defines  the way data flows on the Internet (150).
-Aside from its significance to network computing, Theseus serves as a vivid example of an early connection between mazes and computers. Furthermore, Theseus shares a procedural resonance with 10 PRINT. Theseus “learned” through a repetitive process the fundamental process that draws the 10 PRINT maze. And like a computer program, the mouse in Shannon’s maze was only the surface level signifier of much deeper processes. Theseus in fact was dumb, inert. The “brain” of Theseus lay in the relays hidden underneath the surface of the maze, much in the same way the on-screen design of 10 PRINT is generated by an piece of code, initially not very clear, which depends upon an invisible, low-level call to generate pseudo-random numbers.
+Aside from its significance to network computing, Theseus serves as a vivid example of an early connection between mazes and computers. Furthermore, Theseus shares a procedural resonance with 10 PRINT. Theseus “learned” through repetition the fundamental process that draws the 10 PRINT maze. And like a computer program, the mouse in Shannon’s maze was only the surface level signifier of much deeper processes. Theseus in fact was dumb, inert. The “brain” of Theseus lay in the relays hidden underneath the surface of the maze, much in the same way the on-screen design of 10 PRINT is generated by an piece of code, initially not very clear, which depends upon an invisible, low-level call to generate pseudo-random numbers.
 === The Computerized Maze  ===
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 ==== First Person Mazes ====
-A significant early maze program was the initially single-player ''Maze,'' which presented a 3D view of a maze in which a player can see (and shoot) opponents. This program was created in 1973 at the NASA Ames Research Center by Steve Colley and Howard Palmer and made into a multi-player game by Greg Thompson. The program then, in 1974, was brought to MIT and elaborated; Dave Lebling wrote a server that provided text messaging and supported up to eight players or robots. The same program was later ported to the Xerox Alto as ''Maze War.''
+A significant early maze program was the initially single-player ''Maze,'' which presented a 3D view of a maze in which a player can see (and shoot) opponents. This program was created in 1973 at the NASA Ames Research Center by Steve Colley and Howard Palmer and made into a multi-player game by Greg Thompson. The program then, in 1974, was brought to MIT and expanded; Dave Lebling wrote a server that provided text messaging and supported up to eight players or robots. The same program was later ported to the Xerox Alto as ''Maze War.''
 In ''Maze,'' the environment was created for entertainment, but it was really a convoluted battlefield, not a space to be explored or solved and certainly not one, like the typical hedge maze, that would serve for non-violent diversion. The more terrifying maze environment became a staple of early home computer mazes. ''3D Monster Maze'' was an early example, developed in 1981 and released the following year on the Sinclair ZX81. The game uses character graphics and features a randomly generated 16x16 maze with a Tyrannosaurus Rex; the player can only flee from this opponent in attempting to exit the maze. ''Dungeons of Daggorath,'' programmed in 1980-1981 and also released in 1982, ran on the TRS-80 Color Computer, features a similar first-person perspective on a maze. While it does not generate different maze levels, it had various additional options for arming one's character and attacking enemies.
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 ====Second Person Mazes====
-Many of the earliest computer-presented mazes were not seen head -n or from above: They were presented in textual descriptions. Second-person mazes of a sort were found in early text-based games such as ''Hunt the Wumpus,'' a 1973 BASIC program by Gregory Yob. ''Hunt the Wumpus'' departed from the standard grid-based BASIC game by providing a playing field of a different topology, one that was a dodecahedron. The player stalked and was stalked by a wumpus opponent, much as the dinosaur would later pursue the player in ''3D Monster Maze.''
+Many of the earliest computer-presented mazes were not visual; they were described textually, narrated to the player from a second-person perspective. Second-person mazes of a sort were found in early text-based games such as ''Hunt the Wumpus,'' a 1973 BASIC program by Gregory Yob. ''Hunt the Wumpus'' departed from the standard grid-based BASIC game by providing a playing field of a different topology, one that was a dodecahedron. The player stalked and was stalked by a wumpus opponent, much as the dinosaur would later pursue the player in ''3D Monster Maze.''
 Textually described mazes developed into their most complex and confusing configurations in text-based adventure games of the sort that are now called interactive fiction. The genre began with the groundbreaking ''Adventure'', written by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 in 1976 and later expanded by Don Woods into a full-fledged underground adventure. Basing the game in part on his own caving experience in the Mammoth Cave system, Crowther included the ten-room maze introduced with: