It's been a while since Wayne Kerr's challenges, but I think I've come up with another difficult one (inspired by the Blue Maze - also by Kerr).
The task is to make a fractal maze (google it and you should come across this one). I'm pretty certain that due to the infinite nature of the maze you can't make a perfect one, but can you make a maze that allows a depth of 5 say?
I've been trying to implement the following maze, but keep running out of board space:
basically all you need is teleporters between the A and B nodes and the four paths which lead "off" the board, and walls that control whether the A or B node is connected to the paths, and also you need an object to make a record of the As and Bs gone into, that can then go back and read them off as you exit
like my turing machine but less complicated
here, i'll do it:
if you have any questions, consult the help file that comes with zzt
It seems unlikely that this deeply unsatisfactory situation will be resolved by a new attempt to answer the old question; instead, as has been suggested by some of the most thoughtful students, we should expect to find that some part of the conceptual landscape in which this problematic entity resides must be reconstructed before it will come into focus.
I moved everything around, and battled with the number of transporters and objects I was allowed, but eventually made the following:
There's a playable version here with or without objects hidden away.
I'd be interested to see a harder fractal maze implemented (or a neater version of mine).
Really none of this stuff needs to be on the same board except the record keeper and the sensors that sense when you enter a copy of the maze. The gates can be controlled on other boards from simple flags, and if you're allowed to use multiple boards you should be able to do it without any teleporters at all.
It seems unlikely that this deeply unsatisfactory situation will be resolved by a new attempt to answer the old question; instead, as has been suggested by some of the most thoughtful students, we should expect to find that some part of the conceptual landscape in which this problematic entity resides must be reconstructed before it will come into focus.
It seems unlikely that this deeply unsatisfactory situation will be resolved by a new attempt to answer the old question; instead, as has been suggested by some of the most thoughtful students, we should expect to find that some part of the conceptual landscape in which this problematic entity resides must be reconstructed before it will come into focus.
It seems unlikely that this deeply unsatisfactory situation will be resolved by a new attempt to answer the old question; instead, as has been suggested by some of the most thoughtful students, we should expect to find that some part of the conceptual landscape in which this problematic entity resides must be reconstructed before it will come into focus.
Jur wrote:It sounds cool but...y'all lost me at 'fractal'.
I'm not sure of the exact definition, but I thought a fractal was a shape which contains smaller copies of the whole shape within it.
With the mazes above the maze contains 'smaller' copies of the whole maze. Instead of drawing the whole maze again the smaller copies have been represented with boxes.
This might help with understanding fractals... An animation of a Koch curve, a simple fractal. It is constructed by taking a line and making a triangular peak in the center. This process turns the line into four line segments; the process is repeated for each of the segments.
Fractal mazes follow a similar pattern. You start off with a maze diagram like
the one TTTPPP posted. In each of the squares in the diagram you would insert a smaller copy of the maze. This would be repeated for the squares in the inserted mazes, and so on.
