![]() For instance, one of the characters is upside down, indicating In hindsight, there are lots of clues in this room that point to Upside down, and used it as a candelabra! Let’s look closely at room 29, looking for a hidden door into room 17,Īha! There’s a door to room 17 hidden behind the curtain, theĬharacters in this room just took off the sign for it, turned it Have the hidden door in it! Rooms 2 and 8 aren’t very interesting but Illustrations of rooms 2, 8, and 29 by hand to see which one might This is a small enough list of candidates that we can just look at the NetworkX represents edges as tuples, so ('2', '45') means an edgeįrom node 2 to node 45 (i.e. We can also see that while thereĭoesn’t seem to be a path from the beginning to the end, there is a Marketing copy that the path from the beginning to the end of the mazeĪnd back has exactly sixteen steps. OK, how to find the the hidden door? Well, we know from the book’s Spoiler warning: stop reading here if you’d like to try to Next, I wrote a small program that helped me find the hiddenĭoor. It, and I never would have figured it out if a graph search algorithm More magical! I’d never suspected that it had something like this in This was already really cool and made the book feel Maze, connecting two rooms that don’t at first appear to be connected,Īnd discoverable only by careful examination of the It dawned on me that there must be a “hidden door” somewhere in the Indeed, no such path exists! What could be going on? This throws an error: NetworkXNoPath: No path between 1 and 45. Import networkx as nx import pydot g = nx. The first thing I did was to go through the book one page at a timeĪnd transcribe all the connections between rooms into a graph written That was silly, and she was right! I decided to write some programs to Would rob the book of some of it’s magic. But I felt that his would be cheating somehow-like it A natural next step would have been to turn toĬomputers, since a graph search algorithm could tell me very quickly Possible path, and as you can see in the picture, room 45 is nowhere Unreachable from room 1! I was fairly confident I had mapped out every It was still useful though,īecause it led me to the surprising conclusion that room 45 is As IĮxplored, I kept track of where I’d been by drawing circles for roomsĪnd lines between them for doors, building a graph of the maze in the process:Īs you can see, this got messy fast. I moved on to trying to “map” the maze using a pen and paper. Was never going to solve the maze this way. I started out by just wandering among the rooms more or less at The maze as a kid, and I was excited to try as an adult! Got me another as a gift after I mentioned it to them. My childhood copy was lost long ago, but a couple of very kind friends Stepping into a Hans Christian Anderson story or a Guillermo del Toro movie. The book is full ofĪllusions to fables and fairytales, gothic architecture, furtiveĬlues, and mysterious symbolism. Room are also delightful in their own right. Woodcut illustrations and sparse but evocative descriptions of each In addition to the central puzzle, the eerie, painstakingly crafted Then, once you’ve done that,Īnswer the riddle hidden in the illustration of room 45, using theĬlues hidden along the path there and back (this is the hard part, The maze (room 45) and back in only sixteen steps (this is the easy The goal is to find your way from room 1 to the room at the center of To get a feel for what it’s like, you can ![]() To take the door to room 20, you simply turn to page 20, which willĪlso have numbered doors in it. For example, here’s room 1, the entrance to the maze: Maze, and containing numbered doors that you can use to go to other Each page has an illustration depicting a room in the titular ![]() The book itself is nonlinear-sort of like theĬhoose-your-own-adventure books that were also popular when I was a Rob the book of some of its magic, but it actually made it feel more I thought that applying programming to it would Recently solved the puzzle (or at least the first, easiest part of it)īy writing a program. When I was a kid I had a unique and interesting book called MAZE: ![]()
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