Talk:Mazes

From Maze

This is from an email of Casey's:

"A quick note... as I was re-reading your chapter today, I remembered that navigating a maze is a common genetics algorithm (GA) assignment for CS students. This picks right up from the rats and Shannon machine. To my knowledge, the assignment is based on early GA research from John Holland and now similar algorithms are explored using robots in mazes."

The text on dance from Patsy and me went to the Perspectives on 10 PRINT chapter. Nickm 15:44, 24 November 2010 (UTC)NickM

I (Mark) have inadvertently lost the first part of my notes.

General thoughts.

The intro now lacks punch, though, perhaps has gained precision. The sections up till Dance seem much better. Your edits to the Theseus section and material mazes seemed very strong.

Where will we put the very large sections in Dance that you and Patsy wrote? I worked on those a bit following Noah's notes but need to do more work.

I say we restore the math section (albeit with refinement and development) -- possibly not in this chapter. As with the psychology and dance sections, it can emphasize how mazes are treated mathematically -- in other words, how they are represented and solved. The connection between solving mazes and solving other "shortest path" problems -- reveals how fundamental the "solving mazes" is to many contemporary problems. The Dantzig problem is surely a digression, though has the potential to be entertaining. It's fine to cut, but I'd argue for this section since it evokes key discipline. Also, Patsy seemed to think it was one of our stronger sections. Note, this could be added to Experimentation section, possibly...

The second half of the chapter feels like a different chapter altogether. It might make more sense to give this its own space since mazes in the realm of computing has so many connections with other aspects of 10 PRINT.

Cut: 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.

I agree with Nick that the Computer Maze section, though it produces interesting typologies, does not keep with the emphasis on meaning or with the effects of these mazes on the way Commodore users would perceive 10 PRINT. Did they feel like they were able in one line to make their first steps toward building Pac-Man, for example?

We still haven't tackled the second half.

Second Person Mazes: It is in our best interests to connect Adventure and the Myth of Theseus -- even passingly.

cut: The cultural resonance of mazes can be seen in numerous maze-based movies. According to Clifford Pickover, the first major one of these was aptl called The Maze, and was 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 (1980). The Internet Movie Database lists 33 films, television shows, and videogames with the word “maze” in their title, including a 1929 melodrama, The Devil’s Maze, and the 1916 film, The Purple Maze. And there more than 100 motion pictures and videogames whose titles contain “Labyrinth” -- not just the famous film with David Bowie.

As I see it we have two choices with the second half, maybe three.

1. Commit to the schema of 3 types of computerized presentations and explain its meaning for 10 Print</li>
2. tie the computer mazes to their respective categories above (danger, experimentation, etc.)</li>
3. spin this off into its own chapter.</li>

I'm leaning toward #2. It could be achieved either by moving the computer mazes into their respective categories or alluding to the categories from within part 2 of the chapter.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the 2 most important aspects (as evidenced by the fact that they have been written) are 2nd and 3rd person.

Tying 2nd person text to programming manuals has potential to be an awesome concluding point here. If developed, it could tie together the notion of the programmer as Theseus being hailed into the maze to face the PET -- or however you want to draw that analogy. The Commodore manual here becomes part of the maze discussion much more fully.

1st and 3rd person mazes have obvious parallels in the mazes above.

Another point that should be emphasizes are the user-drawn maps -- again, because this practice has strong ties to learning programming with flow charts but also a sense of trying to trace out the paths within the system of the computer.

Without the schema (which we could move elsewhere or Mark could turn into a sweet article), we'll have more room to discuss the evocations of these early computing mazes in popular PC culture. Again, I find it insightful, but am having trouble seeing how this chapter all fits together.

I (Nick) have just cut the chapter down significantly to focus it on what is most relevant to 10 PRINT, recognizing that some other background is necessary. I have not reorganized it, but I have an idea for a organization that would be more focused:

• 2 paragraph intro
• Death and Danger (the maze as confusing, dangeous; Minotaur)
• Ritual and Allegory (religious mazes, dance)
• Recreation and Play (secularization, hedge mazes, puzzle books which are still missing from the current draft)
• Experimentation (the researcher's maze with rats, includes "Mouse in the Maze" and Claude Shannon's "Theseus" which is still missing from the current draft)
• The Computerized Maze (continuing recreation and play, adding info about generated mazes; this section has to tell us what these mazes mean within culture)
• 2 paragraph conclusion speculating on what the 10 PRINT output means

The Tempest quote is great but I think we need to refer to it in the text (maybe at the end) to really get the most out of it. If I understand it correctly, it's saying that the convoluted situation of that play is as much a maze as is a material, human-scale maze that people can walk. That's cool, we should lightly gloss that and refer to it.

I removed the detailed discussion of the 1982 three-line program and the 1984 one-line program. We need to cover this earlier in the book -- maybe in the intro or chapter one -- and probably in more detail.

I now have this sentence but I don't like it: "A maze’s reason for being, its designer’s intent or purpose, drives the designer’s choice of unicursal or multicursal design." Actually it's hardly ever the case that a designer has a choice, any more than a designer would choose whether s/he's going to design a mosque or a cathedral. The choice is really culturally proscribed, isn't it?

"Oxford English Dictionary" should be in the bibliography. We should specify that we're using a particular edition and that we're accessing it electronically.

"But 10 PRINT has no Daedalus, not even a credited author. It is itself a massively productive little architect that constructs and constructs and endlessly constructs, without pause (until the person at the keyboard intervenes), creating an endless, unsolvable maze." This same point is made twice with no elaboration or development. I have removed it and replaced it with my related point: That part of the general myth of the maze is that it is designed and built, and 10 PRINT resonates powerfully because it is a method for building a maze, not just a visual depiction of it.

"Whether myth or reality, and however apocryphal, this story, its maze, and its creator’s role, are instructive. 10 PRINT may hide no Minotaur in its center, but the Cretan labyrinth and the search for the mazes of antiquity launch a mythology around mazes as the challenges of heroes. The code of the program itself plays the role of Daedalus. The wit and riddle of 10 PRINT stems from the cleverness of its concision, the elegance of its simple conceit. Mastering the Knossos maze required a clever hero with an enamored helper. 10 PRINT is an extension of Ariadne's string and in that maze-like output novice programmers no doubt hear the echo of the Minotaur's roar." I repaced this with a new metaphor: the user is not Theseus, but a collaborator of Daedalus's.

"A maze becomes a dance when the pathways become the visual depiction of the dancer's path." This sentence sould be clearer about whether the pathways are built to trace the path of an existing dance or to proscribe how a dance is to be done. If it's both (in which case I think the trace has to come first), that should be explained, too.

"Think of the labyrinth as a sort of mental canvas," This is very confusing to me. The labyrinth as I understand it is a material and formal pattern/structure. How it is "mental"? Also, why is it helpful to think of a "canvas"? What sort of canvas? A painter's canvas or the sail of a ship? I don't think of a canvas as tracing/proscribing motion unless it's a canvas of Jackon Pollack's.

"a topologically complex world" I think I undertand this and the use of the term seems correct, but I replaced it with a simpler phrase that I hope will be easier to understand.

"Indeed, the Cretan labyrinth may have materilized through dance." I removed this -- In the simplest view, "materialized" means "made material." This paragraph suggests that an architected maze (which is very material) gave rise to a dance (which I think is material, too, but that's questionable and it certainly isn't as material as a building). To call this process "materialization" seems somewhat odd.

", with the V- formed set, perhaps illustrative of a sexual fear as well, as the Minotaur leaps and pounces over the fallen female figure, prior to his own downfall." I chopped this off from the quotation. That Graham has an explicit maze-dance is worth noting, I think. But I have no idea what the V-formed set is. And while the rest of the quote is provocative, I can think of no way in which it helps us understand 10 PRINT.

I removed the section "Mazes in Mathematics" because it's not clear to me that this should be a section, and I don't come out of this section knowing much about mazes (specifically, as opposed to networks) and mathematics. Most of this section consists of a digression about George Dantzig, ending with a mention of autorouters (no definition of an autorouter is given) and an intriguing but poorly sourced connection between the autorouter and the Hampton Court Palace maze. Although some of this may be worth mentioning in the book, it seems to mainly point out that there are famous individual mazes that keep cropping up in different contexts -- so I might collect this, along with perhaps the discussion of the Hampton Court Palace maze and behavioral science, and mention it all when the Hampton Court Palace maze is discussed. There perhaps some connection between striving for optimality and writing a clever one-line program, but it is not directly the same. The code for 10 PRINT is not optimum (best) in terms of how concise it is; it fits a one-line (and 40 character) constraint but it could be shorter. There is no reason to think that optimization techniques were used to compress the code. In any case, if this really sheds line on the concise, one-line nature of 10 PRINT, it should be mentioned in whatever section discusses the concise nature of the program.

"Perhaps it is the labyrinthine nature of film itself, which spins along its path of images with a similar meditative, unicursal inevitability." I like this, but there are two problems -- first, the chapter earlier denies that "labyrinth" means "unicursal." Second, while clever, this doesn't do anything to advance our understanding of 10 PRINT. So, removed.

"In these examples, the maze becomes a metaphor of horror and confusion, a site for getting lost rather than a contrived riddle to be solved. In the montage of cinematic narrative, a “maze” becomes metanymic for the space (physical, mental, real, imaginary) that obfuscates its path, that traps the wanderer, that will not make itself straight for the one who encounters it. In the 80s it also became the space where those who retreat into their imaginations through creative hobbies of writing or role-playing, will lose themselves to minotaurs of madness. Mazes thus become attached to tales of male obsession and isolation, the minotaur as a gendered cautionary tale." Semms to restate what's said previously in more general terms. I can't see how this advances our understanding of 10 PRINT. So, removed.

Before mentioning Adventure, it's necessary to mention the 1973 Hunt the Wumpus, which may be the first BASIC game that used a non-Cartesian playing space -- a dodecahedron.

"yet this aspect of interactive fiction [second-person narration] has been widely ignored" -- two of the ten authors of this book have done dissertations discussing this, Jill Walker's dissertation is about this, and it's widely discussed in the IF community. Any text that contains instructions (a cybertext), e.g. a CYOA or Mark Saporta's Composition No. 1, has this feature, which is discussed in Aarseth's Cybertext as well. For now, I have just removed this part of the sentence, but the "autotelic" discussion is going to have to take this existing critical writing into account. The discussion can be useful since the instructions surrounding the program use "you" in a potentially interesting way, but it needs to draw on and build on previous work.

I removed the ASCII maps of Adventure and Zork and the hand-drawn map of Adventure because I do not understand what they tell us about 10 PRINT. For one thing, I don't know why we need to show a map. If there is something we learn from looking at the map (that the non-maze environment was just about as maze-like as the official mazes?) we can put some or all of it back in. For another thing, I don't know why we want to show ASCII maps. If we just need to assert that ASCII-art representations of mazes existed prior to 1982, can't we just say that?

This chapter has nothing like a conclusion or other synthesis of the discussion.

The following are notes (not draft text) that I moved here:

(Sidebar? Summary IF and the tradition of box diagram maps, the importance of mazes in Adventure / Zork / Acheton, and the contextual relationship to home computing and dominance of early PC video game industry. The maze was already a part of the culture of computer games before the computer game became visual.)

   * c64 Programmers reference guide
   * Potential illustration for IF sidebar
         o Map of Varicella?
         o MC Frontalot It is Pitch Dark @2:38
   * Porting / Reimplementation as Translation vs. Adaptation
         o Benchmark fiction?

[edit] Additional Images

Pac-Man (1980 arcade) -- a maze-like field of partitions must be run while being chased by ghosts Map of Adventure for Atari 2600 (VGmaps) 10 PRINT CHR$(77+RND(1)*2); : GOTO 10

Nickm 18:06, 18 November 2010 (UTC)Nickm