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 operation 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.
Contents[hide] |
Arguably one of the most intriguing characteristics of 10-Print is the maze-like pattern it produces. Or is this output actually a maze? The history of mazes, particularly in Western culture, does not answer that question easily. Nor does the attempt to call this a maze as distinct from a labyrinth, though the latter term seems to be sedimenting with the meaning of elaborate and twisting unicursal passageway. Calling this pattern "maze-like" raises complexities: it cannot be traversed (though Michael Mateas' program traverses it), it has no ending (though stopping the program terminates the maze drawing), it was not designed as a puzzle (though mazes are not necessarily solvable).
Nonetheless, calling this program something other than a maze generator, for example, a random-line-pattern generator, quickly drains it of at least a portion of its mystique. Mazes are bewildering puzzles, places of terror, amusements, challenges, organizing structures, and pleasing patterns. So what does it mean for a home computer in the early 1980s to display a maze in the way the 10 PRINT program does? Computers could and did display many other things. What did the maze, specifically, signify and connote? This chapter examines the role the concept of "maze" plays in making this one line program so tantalizing.
The first part of the chapter will examine the conceptual permutations of the word "maze." From ancient Greece, the legendary labyrinth of Knossos establishes the maze as terrifying and life-threatening space. Even so architectural spaces called labyrinths appeared in descriptions and ruins in Ancient Egypt. The labyrinth found its way into the spiritual centers on the floors of cathedrals. However, mazes have also served as directions for dances. Hedge-row mazes bring the maze into the realm of public shared diversion. In puzzle-books, mazes became an even more common-place diversion, one in which the depiction and the structure were conflated. In psychology the maze becomes the tool of examining behavior. In role-playing games, the maze became the structural frame of the encounters. Finally, and growing out of all of these traditions, in computer games, the maze became one of the central concepts used in the design of levels.
Consistent throughout these various concepts of maze is a sense of providing a structure (whether navigable with body, pen, or joystick) to organize or constrain a person's encounter with a space (whether by setting them on a track, offering them a puzzle, or merely deciding pathways and dead-ends).
The second part of the chapter explores the degree to which the program generates mazes and how permutations in the code can affect that status. How does, for instance, changing the thickness of the lines affect a viewer's perception of the maze? How does the single-line of code present itself as a maze for the novice programmer encountering this code in the beginner section of a manual?
The last considers the kinds of mazes produced by the program.
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 that the output does qualify as a maze. But what if one wanted to insist on the strictest possible view of the constructed puzzle-maze with a single solution, denying that the output of this program is a maze at every moment? Even then, what could the output possibly suggest, what could it evoke in the viewer, if not the concept of the maze? 10 PRINT is a maze-generator, but even if there are some who deny this, they will have to grant that it is a program that is associated with and 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 itself (not its output) 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.
Ancient and Mythological Mazes
Of course, the most famous maze is the Cretan Labyrinth, where Theseus slew the Minotaur, finding his way with the help of Ariadne's string.
The Cretan Labyrinth in which Theseus encounters the Minotaur offers perhaps the most famous ancient maze, through which the Ancient Greek hero found his way only with the help of Ariadne’s thread. While such necessity suggests that the structure was a maze, having multiple decision points, early depictions of the structure were labyrinthine, in other words, monocursal. Why would anyone, Greek hero or no, need a string to find their way through a labyrinth, a unicursal twisted passageway without deadends or choices? And yet that is exactly the kind of maze depicted in most of the ancient imagery. Regardless of the depictions, the myth portrays a space of twisting paths that is difficult to navigate, and it establishes the challenge of path-finding puzzle in Western culture.
Plutarch includes in his lives the myth of the labyrinth of Knossos, designed by Daedalus. In the story, in payment for the slaying of his son Angrogeos by the Athenians, Minos required the Athenians send as a tribute to Crete seven men and women who met their fate, whether slain by the Minotaru or "wandering the labyrinth, and finding no possible means of getting out, they miserably ended their lives there" (excerpted in Kern 41). The Minotaur, part man, part bull, was the merciless monster of the maze. Actually, this is merely one of the main competing stories Plutarch recounts.
Theseus set off to end the bloody tribute, by serving as one of the seven. When he arrives at Crete, he wins the affection of Ariadne, the king's daughter, who offers him a technique for defeating the labyrinth by tying a string to the entrance and unraveling it as he proceeded through the maze. Theseus makes his way through the maze, slays the Minotaur, and follows the string back to the entrance. The victorious Greek hero takes Ariadne back with him to Athens.
The Cretan maze may have its origins in Egypt, where Herodotus describes a labyrinthine building: [I won’t be using all of this]
It has twelve covered courts - six in a row facing north, six south - the gates of the one range exactly fronting the gates of the other. Inside, the building is of two stories and contains three thousand rooms, of which half are underground, and the other half directly above them. I was taken through the rooms in the upper storey, so what I shall say of them is from my own observation, but the underground ones I can speak of only from report, because the Egyptians in charge refused to let me see them, as they contain the tombs of the kings who built the labyrinth, and also the tombs of the sacred crocodiles. The upper rooms, on the contrary, I did actually see, and it is hard to believe that they are the work of men; the baffling and intricate passages from room to room and from court to court were an endless wonder to me, as we passed from a courtyard into rooms, from rooms into galleries, from galleries into more rooms and thence into yet more courtyards. The roof of every chamber, courtyard, and gallery is, like the walls, of stone. The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade.
Kern doubts whether this was the building at all and suggests that the labyrinth of Knossos alludes to a dance, a topic for later discussion.
However, the depiction of this myth include a pattern that as Miller notes has been "conventionalized:
Starting from the exterior, the 'path' runs inwards a short distance, turns so as to run parallel with the other wall until nearly a full circuit has been completed, then doubles back on itself and runs round in the opposite direction, doubles upon itself again, and so on until it finally comes to a stop in a blind end, having traversed all of the space within the outer walls without covering any part twice and without forming any branches or loops. (45).
Miller notes that this labyrinth is not a "puzzle." Nonetheless, it appears on coins, walls, and other ancient surfaces including some graffiti scratched on a pillar in Pompeii.
(how this ties to our maze) So while the location or shape of this mythical maze becomes a grail quest, the labyrinth becomes the icon of the story of the maze and the two concepts become entangled. Mazes and labyrinths become places of beastial horror, puzzles that require the collusion of paramours. Mazes become elevated into the pantheon of heroic challenges, literally the stuff of legends. Without a doubt, this mythological status has fueled the search for physical mazes and labyrinths from antiquity to the present.
Other Egyptian Labyrinths date back to 3400 BCE and a labyrinth in the tomb of King Perabsen of the Second Dynasty. In her book, Mazes and Labyrinths of the World, Janet Bord examines appearances of maze in other parts of the globe. For example, she mentions the “long barrows, megalyths, camps and henges of Britain and north-west Europe” as signs that these sorts of patterns, labyrinthine or mazelike, were “not in the first instance diffuse outward from an original birthplace, but developed independently in more than one area” (10). The search for the antecedent to the physical mazes perhaps is the wrong path to pursue. The history of mazes should not start with the earliest mention or depiction of mazes but with the formulation of walled architecture or social spaces with intersecting passages… Furthermore cave structures, for example, the paths modeled in Adventure, offer naturally occurring mazes (more on that in a moment)
Mazes and Labyrinths, however, are not associated only with their physical structures or two-dimensional forms; They can also be patterns of physical movements. In other words, pathways. Dance executions of mazes have been and continue to be performed as areas, such as Italy, Corfu, Munich, Upper Bavaria. There is the Geranos (Crane) dance performed by Theseus performed on Delos. Another commemorates the killing of Hainuwele (divine maiden) on one of the Molucca Islands.
Mazes in Dance
Mazes in Religion
Mazes also have a tendency to turn up in Christian houses of worship, specifically in Italy and France. The earliest labyrinth shows up in the Basilica of Saint Reparata (Algiers) in 324 CE and they continue to be included through today.
These mazes tended to be labyrinths, meant to be walked or crawled on the path to penance. They did not contain dead ends or choice points, until the 15th century, when the aberration appeared as Helmut Birkhan explains, as a "symptom of the secularization of the labyrinth idea" (quoted in Kern 146). The entrances of these labyrinths tended to face the western wall of the church on which scenes of The Last Judgment would be depicted. Thus, these walkable pathways become linked with the idea of the path to Christian salvation.
Labyrinth of Sin The Path to Redemption Easter Dance Images of a Worldview The Path to Jerusalem Maison Dedalus.
Arguably the most famous and largest (approx. 12.3 m) church labyrinth appears in Chartres, and its dimensions have a curious relationship to its symbology. (Kern 153)
Note: Maze as path to be followed as haptic prayer ritual, as allegorical path.
- Note Kern's section on Easter Dance
Hedgerow Mazes
The oldest of the "Turf mazes" or "turf labyrinths" that appeared in England about the beginning of the eighteenth-century and develop into a ever-evolving part of the maze landscape.
Scholars tangle over whether the turf mazes are modeled after the Church ones or vice versa. In Mazes and Labyrinths of the World, Janet Bord writes, "there is reason to believe that there were mazes in stone and turf long before the mediaeval church builders began incorporating them in their designs" (13). Among other pieces of evidence, she mentions the mazes near ancient sites: St. Catherine's Hill, Winchester, Breamore maze near Celtic fields and the maze at Wing in Rutland (13). On the other hand, Kern points to the striking similiarities between the turf mazes and the church pattern, particularly that of Chartres.
Kern traces their history: "It is likely that strains of various traditions converged in turf labyrinths. The original pagan constructions were probably linked to Scandinavian Troy towns and spring rites. Beginning in the 13th century, the design was subjected to a Christian interpretation and installed in churches. During the Reformation, the earlier pagan meanings surfaced once again, soon thereafter to be channeled into harmless popular festivals, and eventually lost." (168)
Shakespeare's the Temptest:
"This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod" (3.3.1)
Midsummer Night's Dream:
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green For lack of tread are undistinguishable. (2.1.98-100)
These turf mazes find stone parallels in Troy towns, "labyrinthine stone patterns arranged on open fields, many of which are found in Sweden, Finland, Artic Russia, and Germany" (Kern 167).
In spite of their connections to church mazes, the "turf maze" has much stronger pagan roots, likely parts of Spring rites.
Louis XIV's hedge maze featured 39 fountains and "cost the equivalent of more than three million dollars to build" (Pickover 16).
Sir Christopher Wren's hedge maze in Hampton Court.
"Mizmaze" is the name for these popular in the south of England.
Uses of mazes: Treading of The Shepherd's Ring or "Sheperhd's Race" at Boughton Green, in Northamptnshire, "Was a popular event in the thre-day fiar held every June" (49).
Larger notions: Physical maze for use for public diversion, entertainment
- "Running" a maze -- future links to video games
Mazes for defense protection
Maze as something that is planned, yet grown
Mazes in Puzzlebooks The oldest depiction of a maze, which is also a maze, dates back to 1200 B.C., according to Kern. However, the phenomena of maze puzzle-books is considerably more contemporary.
Giovanni Fontana has been given the status as the father of the multicursal maze, back at "the dawn of humanism, about 1420" (Kern 136). "Fontana describes three ancient labyrinth structures; he made his design like that of Daedalus" (138). The earliest of his inscriptions (p. 138) was found in Venice and dates back to 1420. (Kern 138). 600 years ago.
Puzzle-book mazes as we know them today...
(Jeremy is going to chime in here, still)
Mazes in Mathematics
The problem of solvability in mazes has become part of the purview of mathematics, particularly in the area of "critical path analysis" (CPA).
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 contrived riddle to be solved.
RPGs
Dungeons and Dragon as the prototypical second-person tabletop RPG game. (Will dig up some old DM manuals and D&D modules, to see what's in there about mazes.)
Game Books
While Choose Your Own Adventure books are not strictly mazes, the emulate the labyrinthine aspect of mazes, of facing crossroads with multiple paths. (Question: does any CYOA book actually have a maze in it? Maybe one of the Zork ones?)
A notable book that literalizes the maze-like aspect of CYOA books is the 1985 appropriately named Maze, by Christopher Manson (published by MacMillan in 1985) (online version)
Mazes in Computers
Introduction
The phenomenon of mazes as a staple of computer culture is not distinct from the other cultural and historical instances of mazes. As the earlier sections of this chapter make clear, mazes have been a significant part of human culture for millennia. With the arrival of the computer in the sixties, and graphical displays in the seventies, however, the maze entered what might be thought of as a renaissance. There are two important developments in this period to consider: (1) the ability to easily generate complete maze-like structures on a screen or, with older computers, printed output; and (2) the appearance of procedural mazes, that is mazes traversed not through physically walking through space nor through tracing a pencil on a page, but through navigating ergodic, interactive text.
Screen Mazes
One is tempted to pin the advent of maze craze to the release of Pac-Man in the U.S. in October 1980, followed by Ms. Pac-Man in 1981, and the popular (though problematic) subsequent ports of those games to the Atari VCS in early 1982 (Pac-Man) and late 1982 (Ms. Pac-Man). Pac-Man appeared on the Commodore 64 itself in 1983. Early descriptions of Pac-Man often described the playing field of the game as a "maze." For example, in 1981, the New York Times characterized Pac-Man as "a circle with a big mouth that eats up dots in a maze while other big mouths try to eat it up" (Latham 1981), while Newsweek mentioned the "maddening Pac-Man maze" the same year (Langway 1981).
But even before they hit the mainstream in Pac-Man, mazes were a staple of computer culture, and on-screen maze-like structures abound [1] in the early days of video arcades and home computers.
Procedural Mazes
Procedural mazes are mazes in which the entire structure of the maze does not coherently exist in physical or visual space. The maze resides in code. Or rather, the potential of the maze resides in code. Only a portion of the maze is ever available to be traversed at any given time; the rest remains to be generated by algorithms. There are two types of procedural mazes found in the seventies and eighties: textual and visual.
Textual Procedural Mazes
While visual mazes might seem to be more "maze-like," in fact, the early procedural mazes were most often textual. Most significantly, mazes were a central feature of early text-based adventure games, now known as interactive fiction. Mazes in these games were not symmetrical spaces to navigate so much as puzzles to solve, non-Euclidean space represented textually. The genre began with the groundbreaking Will Crowther's Adventure, written for the PDP-10 mainframe in 1977 and 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 in Adventure a ten-room "MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE." Woods would go on to add a second maze, this time "TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT" (Jerz 2007, 23).
One important consequence of textual procedural mazes is that the players solving them often generated secondary, visual mazes, often sharing them via BBSes or home computer user groups. Maze begets maze. For example, Jason Scott's TEXTFILES archive of text files found on BBS, FTP, and Gopher servers in the eighties, holds several early ASCII maps created by players of Adventure, such as this map of the twisty little passages all alike:
Note: This maze is the same for both Adventure 350 and 550
_________ ______________
| |___| |
| W___W |
______________| | |_____ E _____|
| ___________S | | | ___
| | | | _____|W |_____ _____|N |____
| | | |___| | | |
| | | U___D |______| |
| | | | | E______S |
| | |E ______| |_____ S _____| |______ E ____|
|W |______ | | _____|W |_____ | |
| | | |__________| |___ ___|S |____
| | |_____________E D | | |
| | | ___| | W|_____
| |__________________| | |E ___________ |
| N__________________U | ___| |___ ____|E |___
|__ S ___| | N ___________| ___| N |__| |__
| | | | |___S,E W__S (EXIT)U__
|__| ___|W |____ | | | |
| | |___U,D ___| |____ W ___|
___| | | | | |
|___D | ___| |___ ____| |___
|___ E ____| | U,D | | N |
| | |__________| | |
| | ___ ___| |
___|W |_____ ___| W |___ |___W |
___| | | | |___S,E ____|
|___S BRINK OF |___| | |__|
| PIT N___S E|________________
|D ______ E | |__________________ W |
| | | |______________________| |
| | |_________________________ N |
_____|~~|____ |___ NW __|
| | | |
| BIRD CHAMBER| ___| |__
_____| |___ | BACK |
W_______________________E |PIRATEDEN|
Downloaded From P-80 Systems 304-744-2253
Adventure was enormously influential upon a generation of programmers and videogame players, but most immediately, the text adventure game inspired the even better known Zork. Zork too included a troublesome maze, its complexities most evident when fully mapped, as in this ASCII map:
NOTE: This maze is formatted for 80-columns!
ZORK I - Maze Map
______________________________________
|v __________________________________ <|
|v| ______________________________ |^|
|v| |v __________________________ <| |^|
|v| |v| ____________ _____ |^| |^|
|v| |v| | #1 |___|TROLL||^| |^|
|v| |v| | E___W ROOM||^| |^|
|v| |v| |W ________ S| |_____||^| |^|
|v| |v|__|v|__ __|v|__ |^| |^|
|v| |__/ N |__| S | |^| |^|
|v| | #3 /__D #2 | ____|^|_|^|__________________
|v| |_ W __| |__ E __| |> __|^|_|^|________________ v| ________
|v| __|v|________|v|__ |^| |^| |^| |v| | |
___|v|___| N #4 W |__|^| |^| |^| ______ |v| | THIEF |
|> _|v|___|_____ U __________|____| |^| |^| ____| #10 |_|v| | DEN |
|^| |v| _____|v|_____ ___ |^| |^| |v __E U___| | #18|
|^| |v| |#5 N | | #6| ____|_|_|D|__|E| |__ W _| |__ D ___|
|^| |v| |SKELETON ROOM|_| |_| #9 |__ |v| _____ |^|
|^| |v| | SW_ U_N&W /< | |v| | #11 | __|U|___
|^|_|~|__ |_______MarkSample___| |_ E| |________ S ____||^| |v| | || |
|__D #8 |________|^|___ |v| |^| | | |^| |v| |_NE _||CYCLOPS |
| SW_____SW D #7 | __|W|______|^| |E|_____|_|__|v| |v| | #17 |
|NE_NW| | || #12 D_| | #16 S_| |v| |_NW ____|
|v| |v| |E __ U _||E __ U __ S| |_ D ______W | ___|_| _|^|_
__|v| |v| |v| |v| |^| |v|__|v|_____|^|___|_||^|__| #14 |__| SE |
| SW| |v| |v| |v| |^| |____|v|_____|^|______|^|__S W _ W #13|
|GRAT| |v| |v| |v|__|^|_______|v|_____|^|___|^||^| |______| |_ S _|
|#15 | |v| |v|__|____|_|_______|_|_____|^|_____||^| |v| |^|
|__ U| |v| |_____________________________| |____|^| |v| |^|
|v| |v|_______________|_|_______|_|______________|^| |v| |^|
__|~| |______________________________________________| |v| |^|
|OUT | |^| |v|_______________________|_|____|^|
|SIDE| |^| |__________________________________|
|____| |^|_________________________________|v|
|_____________________________________|
LEGEND: v's, ^'s, >'s and <'s are aids in following some of the paths.
~'s and /'s denote one-way entrances.
NOTE: Hidden passages are not noted on this map. Want to leave some
element of surprise to the game!
Downloaded From P-80 Systems 304-744-2253
Both of these maps utilize the standard ASCII character set---especially underscores and pipes---to "draw" the maze, and in this way they seem to be precursors to the 10 Print maze, which appears to use slashes and backslashes for its wall. Though this comparison is not strictly true, as the Commodore 64 maze relies on non-standard graphical characters that only resemble typographical characters, a topic that will be covered later in this volume.
The use of ASCII to make these maps was necessary, since text files were more easily shared across platforms via BBSes than graphical files, as the graphical formats that are standard today were not yet prevalent. The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), for example, was only introduced in 1987, by the online service provider CompuServe.
Of course, the restriction to ASCII did not apply when maze maps were shared via other means, such as mimeographs of hand-drawn maps, or this detailed map apparently drawn by a gamer named Steven Jones, which was originally published in DEC Professional in November 1982:
Steven_Roy_Zork_Map_for_DEC_Professional.jpg
2535 × 1616 pixels
Visual Procedural Mazes
The 10 Print program that is the focus of this book should be considered a visual, procedural maze, an on-screen maze generated by an algorithm. From its very beginnings, the pattern generated by 10 Print was called a maze. Consider the earliest known iteration of the program, found in the Commodore 64 User’s Guide that was included with every C64 computer (1982). The Advanced Basic chapter offers "an introduction to designing graphics" and provides a "neat little program" that uses the RND function--the random number generator--to draw on the screen:
10 PRINT "{CLR/HOME}"
20 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1));
40 GOTO 20
The program is three lines long; little indeed, but not as small as the program that would later inspire this book. In the course of parsing the three lines, the manual explains that the graphic characters on the right side of the M and N keys "are the two characters that the program is using for the maze" (53). And there it is, the first instance of this pattern generated by the random alternation of two slashes being called a "maze."
Two years later the pattern was once again described as a maze in the Commodore 64 hobbyist magazine Run. A section of Run called "Magic" featured C64 tricks mailed in by users, and in the July 1984 issue, the editor Louis F. Sander announced an
Amazing one liner--Here is one of the best one-liners I’ve ever seen. It works on the VIC and C-64, drawing a continuous maze that is very interesting. (13)
The one-liner was submitted by Dan A. Krueger from Cary, Illinois, and it looked like this:
8 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(8));:GOTO 8
The program is slightly different in form than the three-liner found in the Commodore 64 User’s Guide--a fact that is addressed elsewhere in this book--but the pattern itself should be familiar by now.
Twice, then, in the span of two years this design was described in print as a maze. Why? Why describe the output as a maze and not the more general terms design or pattern? The reason likely depends upon the position that mazes held in computer culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Quite simply, this was the era of the maze craze.
This chapter argues that the use of the word "maze" to describe what by many definitions is not a maze is rooted in the cultural history of the word in the 1970s and early 1980s, when "maze" conjured up specific images that resonated with home computer users.
It would simply be impossible to use the word "maze" within the semiotic domain of computers and not create some association with these games. Therefore, there's some cultural capital at work whenever 10 Print's design was called a maze in the early eighties. It is reasonable to conclude that the various sources from the early eighties that called the 10 Print design a "maze" were explicitly (though perhaps not consciously) tapping into a cultural history of mazes that home programmers and game players would be aware of.
Finally, though there’s no evidence to prove this, one wonders whether the program would have the program have had the same viral-like persistence if its description had made no mention of mazes?
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 cites the largest one she had printed to date as a 200-page maze. However, he gives the title to the 1987 maze produced by Walter Pullen. This 23-foot maze had to be stored on "eight floppy disks" and "require one megabyte of disk space" (7). Pickover later adds an followup note from Pullen about a maze he had generated with "@2 miles of passages" that "stretched over 3031 pages" (8).
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.
Bibliography
Commodore 64 User's Guide. Wayne PA; Indianapolis, IN: Commodore Business Machines; Distributed by Howard W. Sams & Co., 1982. <http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_guide.htm>.
Jerz, Dennis. "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky." DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.2 (2007). <http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html>.
Krueger, Dan A., and Louis F. Sander. "Magic $93." Run Jul 1984. 13-14. <http://www.old-computer-mags.com/magazine/magazine_viewer_eng.php?idx=Run.htm&base=Run&num=007&page=13>.
Langway, Lynn. "Invasion of the Video Creatures." Newsweek 16 Nov 1981: 90+.
Latham, Aaron. "Video Games Star War." The New York Times 25 Oct 1981: 100+.
Map of Twisty Little Passages All Alike Maze. TEXTFILES. <http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/mazmap.adv>.
Zork 1 - Maze Map. TEXTFILES. <http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/maze.zk1>.
