Maze Design (2005)

OP's site is from 2005 and Bosch's site mentions the author of, and links back to, the submitted link ;)

/u/rhiever also published some code on transforming an image into a travelling salesman path: http://www.randalolson.com/2018/04/11/traveling-salesman-por...

I went to Oberlin, where Bob is a professor. The pair of Campbells soup pictures were gallery framed on the wall of one of the classroom buildings

His don't really look like mazes, though. There's never any choice involved in the lines. In a maze, you're constantly needing to decide if you should go left or right. His art is just one single line without any branches, as far as I can tell (...and as you'd expect from a TSP algorithm!).

Did you notice the dates on the page? The linked web page predates Bosch's work.

Seconded. While this book has a lot of nice encouragements to simply coding and enjoying mazes, it also ships with two absolutely kick-ass appendices.

The first is a very short bite-size summary of all of the algorithms that the book has covered, so that you don't have to read through the entire book again to remember the differences between the different algorithms. This is so good I wonder why it is not a standard feature of textbooks in general, such that it has its own standard section name (say "Abridgement"). The key is that it's longer-form than an introduction or abstract or conclusion, but the freedom to occupy its own space allows it to be expressed in human terms, unlike the "real research" parts which have to be a bit more rigorous.

The second is a quantitative comparison of the different algorithms among different measurements, which again is like "why isn't this an appendix everywhere?" and such. It's still not trying to be absolutely rigorous but just to give a rough feel for the different options there.

As a result you can just grab the textbook as a reference, flip through those appendices, say "yeah that's what I'm looking for, longer twistier paths," read up a quick description of how that algorithm works, say "well that's a bit more involved than this other one which looks good enough, maybe I'll start from there."

wow, US$32 for the kindle edition. It looks nice, but a bit too much for a toy book.

One repo I found is https://github.com/G3Kappa/pictomaze. It requires installing processing and the python plugin.

You can see the write up / output: https://medium.com/@G3Kappa/generating-mazes-from-pictures-o...

Thank you for this link! Definitely gonna add this to my coffee table!

I think one would have to attack it the other way: focus on each vortex first, classify its connectivity. Since I think any path from East to West would break a path from North to South and vice versa, you'd have to classify each vortex by what it connects, down to one of:

    {., NE, NW, ES, SW, NS, EW, NE/SW, NW/SE, NES, NEW, NSW, ESW, NESW}

In a more visual language you'd have 5x5 tiles which the bigger picture is made out of:

    \   /    \            /    \   /    \   /    \  /
     \ /      \          /      \ /      | |      ‾‾
      X        X        X        X       | |
     / \      / \      / \      /        | |      __
    /   \    /   \    /   \    /        /   \    /  \

    \            /             \            /    \   /
     \          /               \          /      \ /
      \        /        X        X        X        X        .
       \      /        / \      /          \
        \    /        /   \    /            \

Once you've figured out each individual vortex I think solving the bigger problem is probably doable?

> I have to say I've never really found a maze that was challenging enough to take more than a minute or so to solve.

http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/maze/larger.gif

Enjoy!

Note: This is from the "Think Labyrinth!" site mentioned on the Maze Design site:

http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/maze.htm

It is also not the "largest maze" on that page by far; there are a couple of larger ones (as zip'd files), and likely those aren't the largest today.

I'm pretty certain they are just meant as "art" - and not to actually challenge someone to solve them; but if you are so inclined, go for it!

EDIT: I just wanted to add a bit more about the "dense maze" - the start/end is at the upper-left/lower-right of the maze; the white line is the "path" of the maze (black being the walls). Note how the image "changes" depending on the level of "zoom" - if you fit it to a smaller size, the "white" of the image will take a "cross shape", while other areas are "darker" - zoom in on those various areas, and notice how the path changes; it's a very complex construct!

It had to be said.