Earlier this summer I got to try my first hedge maze in an English country garden, during the open day at Chevening House in Kent. I thought I was pretty good at mazes (on paper, at least), but what I thought was going to be a 5-minute stroll turned into almost an hour of fun turning to desperation.
It's all very well to tell yourself to just follow the left-hand rule, but I hadn't quite anticipated how devilishly the maze is designed — and dozens of children (and children-like adults) running through the maze at the same time add their own complications. The goal of the hedge maze was to reach the tree in the centre (and then find your way out again, which proved to be the tricky part for me). My gratitude goes to Mike and Sara for pointing the way out to me from the hill nearby!
Speaking of trees, many simply-connected mazes can be represented by a mathematical tree, with the root representing the entrance, and leaves representing dead-ends (or, in the case of one leaf, the exit). Here's a neat D3 script by Mike Bostock that generates a random maze and then redraws it as a tree (via Pete Warden). Mike is the creator of D3 and a graphics editor at the New York Times.
The entire maze didn't quite fit in this blog post, so click here to see it in its full glory.
That's all from the blog this week. We'll be back on Monday -- see you then!
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