Physicists have created the most fiendishly difficult maze

Mildly off topic, but I sometimes re-imagine the myth of the Minotaur as a parable about how the only bars which can't be bent by brute force are the ones made of computational hardness.

Why did they build a maze for the Minotaur with a possible escape route rather than just an ordinary prison? Why leave the possibility of escape open?

Well see, the Minotaur was arbitrarily strong. No material could build a wall strong enough that he couldn't bash through nor a door that he couldn't break down. But, he wouldn't try and break down anything if there was obviously a path right there he could use to go around it normally. By putting him in a maze, he will always keep trying the next path thinking it might be the exit, never attempting to break any wall. The puzzle is harder than any material they could have used to build a prison, as it cannot be bent by the Minotaurs brute force.

Computation (eg cryptography) can be "unbreakable" in a way that bank vaults and deposit boxes can't.

You can make easy mazes harder with extra distracting visual clutter:

E.g. this:

  +-- -+----+----+----+----+
  |    |    |    |    |    |
  |    |                   |
  +-- -+-- -+----+----+-- -+
  |    |    |    |    |    |
  |         |         |    |
  +-- -+----+-- -+----+----+
  |    |    |    |    |    |
  |              |         |
  +-- -+----+-- -+-- -+-- -+
  |    |    |    |    |    |
  |         |         |    |
  +-- -+-- -+-- -+----+----+
  |    |    |    |    |    |
  |    |    |              |
  +----+----+----+----+    +

Is just this, with extra wall material in each cell, reducing the aperture of the passages:

  +    +----+----+----+----+
  |    |                   |
  |    |                   |
  +    +    +----+----+    +
  |         |         |    |
  |         |         |    |
  +    +----+    +----+----+
  |              |         |
  |              |         |
  +    +----+    +    +    +
  |         |         |    |
  |         |         |    |
  +    +    +    +----+----+
  |    |    |              |
  |    |    |              |
  +----+----+----+----+    +

Kind of an aside to the purpose of the maze, but I noticed their maze has no designated exit. You just have to escape the maze from an interior starting point, adding to the challenge because there are many false exits. You can't start from both ends, nor is there a sense that you are getting "closer" to the exit.

I don't think I've seen this maze building technique, even though it seems simple.

I suspect the bit about the maze difficulty is just some throwaway bit of description that the journalist got caught up on.

But does anyone know a good metric for maze difficulty? Or what the study of maze difficult would really look like? The classic maze solving algorithm (right hand rule/DFS) is deterministic anyway.

I made the mistake of walking into a maze at Burning Man, and as I was walking in there were people begging us if we had seen the entrance recently. I didn't think much of it, until I understood just how "fiendishly" designed the maze was. It wasn't very large, maybe 150 foot square, 8 foot tall plywood sheets, so you couldn't just climb out. At the center of the maze was a ladder you would climb up to a platform where you could see the whole maze except the part under the 20 foot square platform you were standing on. And that was the tricky part. It seemed that when you went through the center part of the maze you would end up in an unexpected part of the maze, and even though we could see the maze from above, none of it made any sense to how we might get out. It took us about 30 minutes to get to the platform and another hour to get out. I will never go into another maze again.

Part of the difficulty seems to be the style of jagged edges, making it hard to visually parse.

It looks like that only a small part of the actual maze is reachable from the starting point, which surely reduces the complexity somewhat[1]. But maybe the cutoff for the perimeter in the picture is not at the ideal point to show off the complexity.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/3paGJOk

I discovered a somewhat similar fractal-maze when playing around with the dragon curve[2], maybe I should publish that.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve

When I was a kid I was really good at mazes. I would just stare at the maze, kinda zone out for a minute unfocusing on the entire thing, and eventually one path would look brighter to me somehow. I could never solve a maze by tracing my finger along a route, but if I 'un-focused' it would jump out of the page at me.

My mother has told me I would have them done within seconds, and I'd have a whole book before she'd finish putting the groceries away.

I've never thought much about it other then, 'I used to like doing mazes'; but I wonder if it was a special gift I could have developed.

TIL that one can say "very extremely rarely" in English

> Quasicrystals are a form of matter only found very extremely rarely in nature.

Where is the code for generating these mazes?

The closest I've found is a paper they reference for generating arbitrary rhombic tilings in arbitrary numbers of dimensions, based on the de Bruijn grid method:

https://github.com/joshcol9232/tiling

Part of me wants to write up a quick path finder script to do the maze to see how long it would take. The solution seems like a straight line though, so it could get lucky and zip to the middle.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

No, thanks :)

10PRINTCHR$(INT(RND(1)+0.5)+109); 20GOTO10

I used to draw mazes as an artistic hobby. My mazes are way harder than any of these generated garbage piles. There are expert maze artists that also make vastly better mazes than this.