13-440: A maze is a path or collection of paths, typically from an entrance to a goal. The word is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching ("unicursal") patterns that lead unambiguously through a convoluted layout to a goal. The term " labyrinth " is generally synonymous with "maze", but can also connote specifically a unicursal pattern. The pathways and walls in
26-603: A maze are typically fixed, but puzzles in which the walls and paths can change during the game are also categorised as mazes or tour puzzles. Mazes have been built with walls and rooms, with hedges , turf , corn stalks , straw bales , books, paving stones of contrasting colors or designs, and brick, or in fields of crops such as corn or, indeed, maize . Maize mazes can be very large; they are usually only kept for one growing season, so they can be different every year, and are promoted as seasonal tourist attractions . Indoors, mirror mazes are another form of maze, in which many of
39-405: A set of obstructions within an open area. Maze solving is the act of finding a route through the maze from the start to finish. Some maze solving methods are designed to be used inside the maze by a traveler with no prior knowledge of the maze, whereas others are designed to be used by a person or computer program that can see the whole maze at once. The mathematician Leonhard Euler was one of
52-442: Is around 5 times bigger than The Hampton Court Maze. The center is about 12m × 12m. The maze was designed and laid out by Conrad Penny . The colonial city of Camagüey , Cuba, founded in 1528, layout resembles a real maze, with narrow, short streets always turning in one direction or another. After pirate Henry Morgan burned the city in the 17th century, it was designed like a maze so attackers would find it hard to move around inside
65-413: Is the act of designing the layout of passages and walls within a maze. There are many different approaches to generating mazes, with various maze generation algorithms for building them, either by hand or automatically by computer . There are two main mechanisms used to generate mazes. In "carving passages", one marks out the network of available routes. In building a maze by "adding walls", one lays out
78-448: The knot gardens of Renaissance Europe , and were first constructed during the mid-16th century. These early mazes were very low, initially planted with evergreen herbs, but, over time, dwarf box became a more popular option due to its robustness. Italian architects had been sketching conceptual garden labyrinths as early as 1460, and hundreds of mazes were constructed in Europe between
91-483: The 16th and 18th centuries. Initially, the hedge maze was not intended to confuse, but to provide a unicursal walking path . Puzzle-like hedge mazes featuring dead ends and tall hedges arrived in England during the reign of King William III of England . They were now part of the bosquet or wilderness part of the garden, and extended area of highly artificial formal woodland, with groups of trees enclosed by hedges. It
104-457: The apparent pathways are imaginary routes seen through multiple reflections in mirrors. Another type of maze consists of a set of rooms linked by doors (so a passageway is just another room in this definition). Players enter at one spot, and exit at another, or the idea may be to reach a certain spot in the maze. Mazes can also be printed or drawn on paper to be followed by a pencil or fingertip. Mazes can also be built with snow. Maze generation
117-405: The city. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Tour puzzle A tour puzzle is a puzzle in which the player travels around a board (usually but not necessarily two-dimensional ) using a token which represents a character. Maze puzzles are often of this type. Sometimes the player has more than one token with which to travel. Sometimes certain objects have to be found or retrieved on
130-409: The first to analyze plane mazes mathematically, and in doing so made the first significant contributions to the branch of mathematics known as topology . Mazes containing no loops are known as "standard", or "perfect" mazes, and are equivalent to a tree in graph theory. Thus many maze solving algorithms are closely related to graph theory . Intuitively, if one pulled and stretched out the paths in
143-553: The maze in the proper way, the result could be made to resemble a tree. Mazes are often used in psychology experiments to study spatial navigation and learning . Such experiments typically use rats or mice . Examples are: India Chartwell Castle in Johannesburg claims to have the biggest known uninterrupted hedgerow maze in the Southern world, with over 900 conifers. It covers about 6000 sq.m. (approximately 1.5 acres), which
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#1732844016583156-455: The way. In the case of large hedge mazes , the player makes the trip themselves instead of a token. Often there is a given start and finish position for the player's token. Some tour puzzles demand that certain points on the board have to be visited on the way. Hedge maze A hedge maze is an outdoor garden maze or labyrinth in which the "walls" or dividers between passages are made of vertical hedges . Hedge mazes evolved from
169-452: Was possible to get lost in the much-admired labyrinth of Versailles , built for Louis XIV of France in 1677 and destroyed in 1778. This maze was adorned with thirty-nine hydraulic sculpture groups depicting Aesop's fables . The oldest surviving puzzle hedge maze, at Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, England , was built for King William in the late 17th century. Its distinctive trapezoidal shape
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