Cultural History of Mazes
From Maze
The Magic of Mazes, from the Greeks to the Geeks.
10-Print produces a pattern that the manual calls a maze. Of course, it does not have to use the word maze. It could call it the randomly alternating pattern of diagonal lines. Although that description does capture the output of the program, it does not capture the magical power of the program to create out of a simple alternation a visual pattern recognizable as a maze. The amazing turn of this program is the clever and concise turn by which it produces a maze seemingly by the flip of a coin.
Mazes have an iconic place in the world of early computers and, of course, a much longer place in cultures around the world. They are heavily charged symbols that appear to call the viewer into entering their pathways either physically or visually.
What is a Maze?
One objection to calling the output a maze is the lack of a solution or single correct path through this visual pattern. However, the OED lists two related senses, the first of which requires that there is *exactly* one correct path, the second of which has no such requirement. Consider the following definitions:
A labyrinth, and related senses.
- A structure designed as a puzzle, consisting of a complicated network of winding and interconnecting paths or passages, only one of which is the correct route through; a labyrinth; (occas. in pl.) the windings of a labyrinth. Also (as in quot. 1903): a structure comprising two points joined by a single winding line much greater in length than the direct line between the two points.
- In extended use: a complex network of paths or streets; a bewildering mass of things (material or immaterial), in which the individual components are difficult to separate or make out. In the 16th and 17th centuries often in to tread a maze, perh. with allusion to sense
There are quotations for the second of these senses from 1531 to 1994, including:
1542 H. BRINKELOW Lamentacion sig. Cviii, Leadyng them in an endlesse Maze of dyrtye tradicyons and folish ceremonyes.
So, there is an early occurrence of a maze which presumably (being endless) has no correct path through it ... and furthermore, it is endless.
The relevant definition from the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary is:
perplexed with error. Addison. Syn. -- Labyrinth; intricacy. See Labyrinth. Again, nothing there requires that the maze have a solution.
- A confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth. Quaint mazes on the wanton green." Shakespeare.
- Or down the tempting maze of Shawford brook. Wordsworth.
- The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate, Puzzled with mazes, and
Nothing in these definitions requires mazes to have a solutions.
Certainly all of the definitions of maze attend the perception of this particular program, but these definitions demonstrate clearly that the output does qualify as a maze. As a maze-generator, 10-Print falls under the shroud of the myths of mazes and labyrinths.
History of Mazes:
Scholars of mazes distinguish the labyrinth as unicursal, offering no choices to one traversing it. Hermann Kern has written the book on labyrinths in his Labyrinthe, Erscheinungsformen und Deutungen 5000 Jahre Gegenwart eines Urbilds, later published in English as Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meaning over 5,000 Years. However, unlike the more general category of mazes, a labyrinth is “almost completely enclosed by an outerline” and their paths “are not intersected by other paths” (23). Nonetheless, the history of labyrinths is an essential part of the overall mythos of the maze.
When a labyrinth or maze is the visual representation of a dance, it becomes a kind of score or perhaps even a script or program. However, the movements themselves could be said to be the labyrinth enacted in space over time.
Labyrinths can thus be the boundaries of the space to be navigated or the path that is followed. In the latter sense, the labyrinth may be not just the plan of the path but the path in motion across time. In the case of a solvable maze, the solution path is obfuscated by choice points. The pattern presents not the predetermined path but the challenge toward finding that path. However, once that path is known, the maze becomes changed into the solvable path encompassed by wrong turns. Like the labyrinth, it now has one path to its solution and it can no longer be a maze.
This has important implications for how the notion is abstracted and how 10-Print becomes a maze and a labyrinth. Typing in the program, the beginning programmer engages in the ritual. At the same time, the program begins as a maze to the initiated. Unless the programmer is already fluent in C64 Basic and has memorized the PETSCII tables, she is unlikely to recognize the effects of the program. Once the code has been typed in and executed and the programmer sees the maze, there is no returning to the previous status of the line. This is similar to the process of becoming literate, but not exactly. Nonetheless, these are not mazes that have single solutions. When the programmer is encouraged to make changes to the code, new corridors appear, and the maze itself proves to be endless.
Mazes in Mass Media
According to Clifford Pickover, the first major maze movie was aptly called The Maze, a 1953 horror film directed by William Cameron Menzies. The maze in the film was the hedgerow kind, like the snowed-under maze of The Shining. Pickover adds Labyrinth and The Man in the Maze to his list movie mazes.
In the 1980s around the time of these early video games, a made-for-TV movie, Mazes and Monsters, presented a young 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. Such a movie spoke to both the moral panic around the rpg Dungeons and Dragons and the relationship between that game and the maze motif.
In these examples, the maze becomes a metaphor of horror and confusion. It is the site for getting lost as opposed to a riddle ot be solved.
Computer Generated Mazes
Pickover also includes a section on "the largest computer-generated maze in the world," a title which seems quaint by today's standards. Although he notes the program could generate an 1000-page maze, he sites the largest one she had printed to date as a 200-page maze. However, he gives the title to the 1987 maze produced by Walter Pullen. This 23-foot maze had to be stored on "eight floppy disks" and "require one megabyte of disk space" (7). Pickover later adds an followup note from Pullen about a maze he had generated with "@2 miles of passages" that "stretched over 3031 pages" (8).
Needless to say, this quest for the largest computer-generated maze will always be chasing 10-Print, whose never ending corridors can be drawn merely by executing and repeating that line. These other mazes, such as Pullen's, are single-solution mazes. However, Moore's law no doubt affects maze production at about the same rate that 1 megabyte diminishes as a sign of large memory and the number of pages in a maze print out approaches absurdity.
