I will now give three mazes that are simply puzzles on paper, for, so
far as I know, they have never been constructed in any other way. The
first I will call the Philadelphia maze (Fig. 22). Fourteen years ago a
travelling salesman, living in Philadelphia, U.S.A., developed a
curiously unrestrained passion for puzzles. He neglected his business,
and soon his position was taken from him. His days and nights were now
passed with the subject that fascinated him, and this little maze seems
to have driven him into insanity. He had been puzzling over it for some
time, and finally it sent him mad and caused him to fire a bullet
through his brain. Goodness knows what his difficulties could have been!
But there can be little doubt that he had a disordered mind, and that if
this little puzzle had not caused him to lose his mental balance some
other more or less trivial thing would in time have done so. There is no
moral in the story, unless it be that of the Irish maxim, which applies
to every occupation of life as much as to the solving of puzzles: "Take
things aisy; if you can't take them aisy, take them as aisy as you can."
And it is a bad and empirical way of solving any puzzle--by blowing your
brains out.
Now, how many different routes are there from A to B in this maze if we
must never in any route go along the same passage twice? The four open
spaces where four passages end are not reckoned as "passages." In the
diagram (Fig. 22) it will be seen that I have again suppressed the blind
alleys. It will be found that, in any case, we must go from A to C, and
also from F to B. But when we have arrived at C there are three ways,
marked 1, 2, 3, of getting to D. Similarly, when we get to E there are
three ways, marked 4, 5, 6, of getting to F. We have also the dotted
route from C to E, the other dotted route from D to F, and the passage
from D to E, indicated by stars. We can, therefore, express the position
of affairs by the little diagram annexed (Fig. 23). Here every
condition of route exactly corresponds to that in the circular maze,
only it is much less confusing to the eye. Now, the number of routes,
under the conditions, from A to B on this simplified diagram is 640, and
that is the required answer to the maze puzzle.
Finally, I will leave two easy maze puzzles (Figs. 24, 25) for my
readers to solve for themselves. The puzzle in each case is to find the
shortest possible route to the centre. Everybody knows the story of Fair
Rosamund and the Woodstock maze. What the maze was like or whether it
ever existed except in imagination is not known, many writers believing
that it was simply a badly-constructed house with a large number of
confusing rooms and passages. At any rate, my sketch lacks the authority
of the other mazes in this article. My "Rosamund's Bower" is simply
designed to show that where you have the plan before you it often
happens that the easiest way to find a route into a maze is by working
backwards and first finding a way out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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