Mazes

=== ===

 ''This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod''
 
 &mdash;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. 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 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. 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 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) ===

The terms "maze" and "labyrinth" are generally synonyms in colloquial English, and indeed, many Western languages only have one word to designate the concept of a path-structure. Despite this common usage, over the past century many scholars and historians have argued over the distinction between these two terms. In this proposed distinction, "labyrinth" refers to only to single-path (unicursal) structures, while "maze" refers only to branching-path (multicursal) structures.

In our discussion, the terms "maze" and "labyrinth" are not used to distinguish two different categories of structure or image. In our view, such a distinction does not accurately reflect the history of Western consciousness of the maze as a single conceptual category, in particular our recent popular imaginary in which the environments of Theseus and Pac-Man are related structures. For this reason, we favor the use of "maze" as a general term.

Nevertheless, it is important to clearly distinguish between unicursal and multicursal path-structures, as these often arise in different cultural contexts, have different uses, and produce  different experiences while being used. We term these two types the "unicursal maze" (offering a single path along which walkers proceed, never making a choice about where to turn) and the "multicursal maze" (which invites wrong turns, has dead ends, and may even have multiple paths to the exit or center).

=== What is a Maze? ===

''The Oxford English Dictionary'' offers two definitions:

<ul><li>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.</li>
<li> 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.
</li>
</ul>

The first definition describes one particular type of puzzling network; the second, more metaphorical, allows us to name mazes representations of paths with certain characteristics. In popular use, the term’s meaning has been stretched to cover intellectual puzzles, tangled legal code, and confusing, labyrinthine situations, such as the one Alonso refers to near the end of ''The Tempest.'' 10 PRINT's output, by representing a maze, can evokes a rich collection of associations, each with its own sense of the agency of the one in the maze and the purpose and origin of the maze.

10 PRINT meets some of the criteria that William Henry Matthews establishes for mazes in his definitive ''Mazes and Labyrinths'' (1922): they are "works of artifice,” not "'labyrinths’ of nature, such as forests, caverns, and so forth; they are endowed with "an element of purposefulness in the design" (182); and betray "a certain degree of complexity" (183). Finally he requires "communication" among the maze’s component parts and between its "interior and exterior" (183).

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.

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.

For children over the centuries, unicursal hedge and turf mazes have offered curling lanes for running but less puzzling pleasures than the seemingly endless grounds for playing hide-and-seek out of doors in multicursal mazes. For in multicursal mazes, which are solvable mazes, the solution is complicated by the possibility of making wrong choices at key nodes where directional choices are required. Instead of following the unicursal maze’s predetermined path, walkers in a multicursal maze risk getting lost on their way. They are challenged to find the path that reaches the exit. Once that path is known, though, the one correct path can be seen as a unicursal maze that is fraught by the possibility of wrong turns.

10 PRINT itself, not its output, can be seen as unicursal and multicursal. Typing in this program,  beginning programmers engage in a ritual that has them trace a string of characters without variation. At the same time, this program is, initially, a puzzle to those who have some understanding of BASIC but lack a complete command of the Commodore 64 and a full knowledge of the PETSCII table. Once the code has been typed and executed and the programmer witnesses the maze, there is no returning to a naive view of this line of code -- it is impossible to read the line without imagining its output. From the many possible outputs that a Commodore 64 user might imagine, one line emerges between input and output. With some study, it becomes clear how the program produces this output: the single path through this short but initially tangled program becomes clear. All the same, this program holds more opportunities than this single path. Since the programmer is encouraged to make changes to the code, newly shaped corridors can appear, and the forms that the maze itself takes prove be practically endless.

=== 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 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.

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.

At the same time, the programmer is Daedalus.  Along with its account of Theseus and Ariadne, the legend of this early maze celebrates the one who devised it. Daedalus was the artful architect of confusion and master designer of the labyrinth at Knossos, and has consequently one a place of honor as puzzle-maker supreme: Genre fiction and Joyce both nod to him, for instance.  Daedalus was the first in a long and living history of maze designers and programmers to understand that planning, intentionality, and construction are integral characteristics of the mystique of the maze. 10 PRINT is culturally resonant because it is a blueprint for a maze and a system for constructing a maze, not just a structure or image that appears without any history or trace of its making. And yet it presents a maze without an architect, or rather in 10 PRINT, the process itself becomes the producer. Such a transformation will have larger ramifications for the study of programming culture where the cult of the author, though arguably persisting in the study of algorithms, is eclipsed by the potential for any programmer to become a Daedalus on his or her own.

This equation of the maze with danger and horror would continue to haunt the form even in contemporary film. A snowed-over hedge maze, for example, adds to the horror hiding within ''The Shining'' (1980).  Also in the '80s as adolescent boys and girls busied themselves with 24-sided dice playing ''Dungeons and Dragons'', a made-for-TV movie, ''Mazes and Monsters'' (1982), presented Tom Hanks as a young man who had gone over the edge into a psychosis where he could no longer separate his role-playing game from reality. The movie spoke to both the moral panic around ''Dungeons & Dragons'' and underscored the popular conceptual relationship between mazes and dungeons. More importantly, it suggested that an (evidently) harmless maze within a game could become the threatening and potentially fatal maze that, in legend, Theseus faced.

In this way, 10 PRINT does not put the user in the role of clever Ariadne, heroic Theseus, or the hunted maze inhabitant, the Minotaur. Rather, the programmer becomes an apprentice to Daedalus. Initially, as the user types the program in and runs it without much of an idea of what it will do or why, the user is simply shoveling characters from page to screen like an enslaved Cretan brought on to build a maze. But as the user traces the path of the program and resolves its many twists into an understanding, a solution of sorts, 10 PRINT offers the person at the Commodore 64 the opportunity to collaborate with Daedalus and to fashion new mazes.

=== Ritual and Allegory  ===

The associations evoked by 10 PRINT may begin with the Minotaur's maze, but they continue through history, adding to the complex symbology and sacred rites of Christian churches and then rising in the turf and hedges of the countryside. Mazes take on religious import on the floors of cathedrals and basilicas, which are themselves already highly allegorical spaces, with the earliest appearing in the Basilica of Saint Reparata (Algiers) in 324 CE. Among the most famous and one of the largest (approx. 12.3 m) church labyrinths is at Chartres (ca. 1200 CE). It is a walkable 11-circuit labyrinth ornamented around its outer-ring with “lunations” (Kern 153). Called “Domus Daedali” (The House of Daedalus) it has been the object of endless speculation, from rumors of treasure buried under its center to its functioning as a lunar calculator. No wonder, since mazes and labyrinths, as loci of convoluted meaning, consistently invite decoding and interpretation.

Church mazes tend to be labyrinths to be walked or crawled on the path to penance, allegorical pathways with names like Labyrinth of Sin, The Path to Redemption, Easter Dance, Images of a Worldview, and The Path to Jerusalem. These walkable pathways symbolized paths to Christian salvation, telling not a Minoan mystery but a Paschal one. Their entrances typically face the western wall of the church on which scenes of The Last Judgment are depicted. As with a rosary and the stations of the cross, the Christian labyrinth is unicursal. None contained dead-ends or choice points until the 15th century, when the multicursal aberration appears, as Helmut Birkhan explains, as a "symptom of the secularization of the labyrinth idea" (quoted in Kern 146).

With this secular turn, the maze became a space of leisure as well as ritual, and was lined with hedges, marked by rocks, and surrounded by grooves. Church-like mazes and mazes that invite a ritual attitude surfaced on the turf of Europe, although several of these were more related to pagan rites of spring than to Christianity. In ''A Midsummer Night’s Dream,'' the faerie queen, Titania, ponders the ghostly outlines of abandoned turf mazes:

 The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,<br />
 And the quaint mazes in the wanton green<br />
 For lack of tread are undistinguishable. (2.1.98-100)

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).

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.

While Mazes have been rendered in stone, hedge, and turf, mazes do not require high, mossy walls or lines drawn on marble. Dancers have created the pathways of mazes through their movements since the earliest tales of Theseus.  Dancers weave their steps and movements in space and through time and, in so doing, create an invisible fabric in and of space. The oeuvre of the choreographer, the Daedalus of dance, plays out on the dance floor through sequences of dancers’ steps.  These maze dances have followed a similar trajectory through ancient myth, Christian and pagan rituals, and secular cultural expression in art.  

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.

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 ...”    

Early on, the maze may have been one of the locations in which the dance was performed (Bord 13). However, more than likely the labyrinth is produced by the movement of the dancers. Kern notes that a consistent feature of Games of Troy is the demarcation of inside and outside. It is as if we can see through the walls to Theseus on his way through the Cretan trap. As a result, rather than a set of walls or lines, "maze" names a series of constraints to movement, a set of paths to be traversed, a procedure.  In dance then, to represent the maze is to trace it with ones body, to enact it.

The dancer’s relationship to the maze is analogous to the amateur learning BASIC. The novice programmer prepares to face the minotaur Commodore 64, offspring of the Commodore PET (half-companion, half-machine), with only one line of code as a clue leading to safety.  Treading that line across the keyboard, the techno-Theseus travels safely through the convolutions of code by staying true to each symbol. Though that ritual seems to produce an aporia, the careful adherence to the path ultimately leads to mastery.  At the same time, like the maze dance, it is in tracing this labyrinth, that its very corridors are created -- daunting hallways where PETSCII numbers obfuscate graphical elements and a simple loop conceals an endless string of instructions.  To type the precious few characters of 10 PRINT and then to be amazed by its output is to participate in the creation of that wonder, to enact that dance that establishes the maze.  It is in typing the line and executing the code that the programmer comes into contact with the mystery of concision in code and will thereafter be even more tantalized by the opportunity to build such a clever maze.  

The maze dance has not been forgotten in digital media. It may seem odd to think of ''Dance Dance Revolution'' as a maze game, but its arrows do show a labyrinthine path that the dancer, standing in place, is supposed to navigate. Missing a step is allowed, but the perfect performance will be as ritualized a motion through space as a ''Pac Man'' pattern. Diana Slattery has created a work called ''The Maze Game'' that brings together the maze as a site of meaningful dance. In her digital work and companion novel, moving through a lethal maze takes grace and “literacy,” since the maze is constructed out of glyphs from Slattery’s created visual language “glide.” Slattery’s work stands at the intersection of dance, maze, and narrative, but it is in figuring the maze as an utterance of a language that her work offers the most evocative exploration of mazes as semiotic systems in which communication and literacy are dependent on navigation. In its own way, 10 PRINT also functions at this juncture, a means of evoking literacy by compelling the user, learning to program, to trace the path of its execution and determine how it accomplishes its effect.

Maze in dance illuminates the relationship between the unicursal path of a program and the multicursal possibilities for programmers.  The choreographer’s multi-dimensional vision is invoked, interpreted, and performed by bodies in motion through space. The canvas takes shape in world where there are many choices about how to move; the dancers on stage, in performance, run through this world from beginning to end as though moving through a unicursal, fully plotted path. The labyrinth becomes multicursal for dancers when the plot thickens with improvisation.

=== Rats and Research ===
The maze traveler has had many manifestations: Theseus, the brave warrior; the contemplative tracing a divine mystery;  the dancer tracing a course through invisible walls.  Add to that list rats.  As mazes move through the twentieth century, the sense of mazes as proving ground for heroes or spatial allegorical journeys or even public repasts are joined by a much less romantic function: psychological testing.  In this context, solving the maze does not so much prove bravery, piety, or ingenuity of humans but in many ways reduces human agency and learning to behavioral conditioning of a rodent.  The rat in the maze become the icon of behavioral psychology and are projected upon the human condition.  The co-founder of the influential French group Oulipo, Raymond Queneau, famously described the members of this group, who set writing constraints for themselves, as "rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." In this one line Daedalus and Theseus, master craftsman and epic hero, sprout whiskers and a tail.

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 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.

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.

==== Mouse in a Maze (Sidebar) ====

In 1959, one of the earliest computer programs written for fun - an example of "recreational computing" - depicted an experimenter's maze. The program, which is possibly the first computer program to draw a maze of any sort, was written for the TX-0 at MIT by Douglas T. Ross and John E. Ward. The TX-0 was an experimental computer that, when loaned out from MIT's Lincoln Laboratories, provided one of the first opportunities for people to program when not working on an official project. It also allowed programmers to work on the machine interactively, much as Commodore 64 programmers later would, rather than submitting batch jobs in the form of decks of punched cards. In the program that became known as "Mouse in the Maze," a mouse would move through a maze, eating cheese. The mouse could also consume martinis, which would cause it to become disoriented. Here, the environment implemented was not the hedge maze of diversion and fun, but a more staid experimenter's maze. This was then made playful by the implementation of an amusing reward for the mouse and the simulation of appropriate behavior.

==== Claude Shannon's Theseus ====

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 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  ===

Computers did not completely change the cultural idea of the maze, but they did provide new ways to represent, generate, solve, and play in mazes. And, as computers came into the home and became widely accessible, they helped to bring mazes into daily life once again. In part, this was done through the work of early computer scientists who wrote programs to generate mazes. But many popular mazes were not as computationally sophisticated. They were, however, integrated cleverly into enjoyable computer games that reached a mass audience.

The point of view that situates the player/traveler distinguishes these mazes. There are first-person mazes, partially represented on a screen, in which a subjective perspective is used an a wall or passageway directly in front of the maze walker is shown. There are also second-person mazes, textually represented, in which the maze walker is the “you” who is told the story of the traversal of the maze. And, there are third-person mazes, sometimes fully represented mazes, in which the maze walker maintains a large-scale or omniscient view.

==== 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 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.

Although 3D mazes with some more exploratory aspects were offered in the ''Ultima,'' ''Wizardry,'' and ''Bard's Tale'' series, the maze was more a frightening site for combat than a playful place of discovery in many first-person games. This could be seen as early as 1984 in the Commodore 64 game ''Skull,'' which allowed the player to search for treasure but sent threatening skulls into the maze as opponents. The later DOS games ''Wolfenstein 3D'' (1992) and ''Doom'' (1993) would make this perspective on a maze-like environment even more fearsome. First-person POV is a staple of horror films because it cuts off peripheral vision and so increases the opportunity for surprise.  The first-person maze, in addition to connecting players to the perspective and to some extent the subjective experience of their maze-bound characters, was likely to inspire close and constant attention. The player needed to continually anticipate the position and movement of unseen opponents. Far from being abstract and mathematical, or contemplative, or amusing and playful, the maze in these games, not unlike the maze that Theseus faced, functioned as a challenging, dangerous arena.

====Second-Person Mazes====

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:

 YOU ARE IN A 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). "YOU" works to connect the player to the character in the maze, although in a different way than first-person 3D games do. For one thing, that pronoun sometimes is explicitly used to address the operator of the program rather than to indicate the main character, as when Adventure outputs "IF YOU PREFER, SIMPLY TYPE W RATHER THAN WEST." 

From ''Hunt the Wumpus'' through ''Adventure,'' another notable difference was that second-person mazes were typically turn-based rather than real-time. They also came to be embedded in a broader context of simulated spaces. Sometimes these were confusing ones that, even if they were not called mazes, required that players map them. But in any case, they usually invited different forms of systematic, high-level thinking that would allow the environment to be figured or puzzled out. The player's activity was thoughtful and was paced at the player's discretion rather than being based on twitch reflexes. The activity of completing a text adventure is called solving (as opposed to "beating a level"), the same term that is used for finding a path through a maze.

====Third-Person Mazes====

When players draw maps of the mazes in ''Adventure,'' ''Zork,'' or other interactive fictions, they transform textually represented second-person mazes into fully-represented third-person mazes. Such maps convey a sense of mastery of the maze -- even though a third-person perspective on a maze does not guarantee its safety or solubility. Computers themselves, of course, often represented mazes from above, sometimes to demonstrate their dexterity at producing and solving them and sometimes to provide spaces for play.

The third-person computer maze could be glimpsed as early as 1959 in ''Mouse in the Maze,'' but it truly erupted, in the Unites States at least, less than two years before the release of the Commodore 64, in October 1980. This is when the original ''Pac-Man'' arcade game arrived from Japan. In Japan, the genre of games inspired by ''Pac-Man'' is named after dot eating, but in the United States such games are called maze or maze chase games.

Of course, Pac-Man cannot thread his way through the environment to find an exit -- except for the tunnel that links the left and right side of the screen together. The playing field may be better described as being littered with obstacles rather than as being "a maze" in the sense that hedge mazes, experimental mazes, and the like are usually understood. Nevertheless, the playing field was called a maze from the beginning. ''The New York Times'' called Pac-Man "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" (Langway 1981). The puzzle that is posed to the voracious Pac-Man, or to the player controlling him, is not to get out of the maze but to run through more or less all of it, avoiding the pursing monsters. The player can certainly identify with the abstract figure who is controlled via joystick, but this figure has a life of his own, portrayed in some of the earliest cut-scenes and seen in attract mode, which features Pac-Man running around on his own.

When ''Pac-Man'' was reimplemented for the Atari VCS in 1982, the vertical field was redesigned in horizontal format and for a lower-resolution graphics system. The essential topology of the game (partitions, looped corners, and warp gates connecting one side to the other) remained the same. One very standard feature of ''Pac-Man's'' maze both in the arcade game and on the VCS is that it is aligned to the axes of the display: The paths are either horizontal or vertical. Just as the tanks in ''Tank'' and the player's ship in ''Asteroids'' (1979) can turn and fire in many different directions, it was possible to represent a maze that was not "orthogonal" in this way: 10 PRINT provides a very simple alternative, a diagonal game. But third-person videogame mazes were almost  always aligned as in ''Pac-Man,'' even before the dot eater made his first appearance.

Orthogonal maze-like playing fields were presented in third-person views in several early arcade games, including ''Gotcha'' (1973) and ''Tank'' (1974). In 1976, an arcade game from Midway called ''The Amazing Maze Game'' offered a more or less direct digital version of the standard maze challenge -- move an on-screen token to find a path that allows escape. Videogame mazes quickly made their way into the home, too. The game bundled with for the classic cartridge-based Atari VCS in 1977 was ''Combat,'' which brought the maze-like playing fields of ''Tank'' into the home. Soon after release, that console featured ''Maze Craze'' (1978), which allowed players to compete in several different challenges in mazy environments that were automatically generated.

Another feature shared by all these games (both arcade and for home video game consoles) is their treatment of the screen display as a single complete visual unit, like the board of a board game. The continuously scrolling maze of 10 PRINT at least suggests a maze that is larger than the screen, even if one cannot navigate around to see what is off-screen. An interesting contrast to the single-screen maze is a close-up design that puts the player in a larger-scale maze, seen in the Atari VCS game ''Adventure'' (1979). Adventure was loosely based on the interactive fiction work of the same name, and featured a hero with a sword collecting treasures despite the efforts of four dragons. Unlike ''Pac-Man'', in which the player can guide Pac-Man out a warp gate on one side of the screen and see him enter on the other side, ''Adventure'' contains numerous topologically impossible warps that are always hidden from view, and can only be deduced. Instead of an overview map of the total maze, each screen is a claustrophobic close-up of simple paths, often emphasizing discontinuous fragments of other paths that can't easily be reached. This kind of claustrophobic, discontinuous maze-space was later further explored on the Atari VCS in ''Haunted House'' (1981), particularly in the use of darkness and the addition of keys in some modes to restrict and sequence room access.

The third-person mazes mentioned so far, like the early first-person mazes, kept to the grid of the display despite the different perspective that was presented. Diagonal orientation of the sort produced by 10 PRINT did have a place in the design of early maze-like games. It emerged through isometric video games that introduced diagonal motion at the same time it challenged the picture plane through the pseudo-3D effect of isometric perspective. Two isometric games came to arcades in 1982:''Q*bert,'' an completion/avoidance platform on an isometric pyramid, and ''Zaxxon,'' an obstacle-racer emphasizing pseudo-3D elements. Neither was particularly maze-like. Later isometric games did incorporate maze-like obstacles. Both ''Ant Attack'' (1983) and ''Marble Madness'' (1984) had convoluted obstacle course on a field that was larger than the screen, accessed through scrolling.

While 10 PRINT seems to be a non-interactive 2D third-person maze, its single line of code produces an unusual twist on this form of maze, shifting it to a different axis than is traditionally used. This is accomplished by the simple selection of two diagonal character graphics. It introduces another complexity: even though the maze is built from left to right and down the screen, the walls and paths do not have to follow this axis of construction.

=== Entering the Maze ===

The novice programmer before the machine is the traveler before the maze, and early personal computers were covered in mazes.  In the mid-1980s, it would be impossible for most users to consider a maze-generating computer program without thinking of the many computer games that take place in mazes. But for many the maze would also be associated with different types of terror, play, contemplation, and experimentation. Would they be Theseus or Daedalus? The scientist or the rat?  Pacman or Zaxxon?  And would programming be dancing, meditating, escaping, or solving?   This richness, we believe, were part of what encouraged new Commodore 64 programmers to "enter the maze" (by entering this program on their computer) and to work at solving it, so as to better understand how computing functioned and how it could produce meaningful output.  

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