Alice Maze              
Restart the current maze
Start Maze  1   2   3   4
5   6   7   8
Save the current position
Go back to last saved position  
Sound


Rules: You start this maze on the red square, and your current position is always shown in red. You must make a series of moves that will take you to the goal. Begin each move by following one of the arrows in the red square, and travel in a straight line for a distance equal to d. At the start, d equals 1. When you land on a square with a red arrow, 1 is added to d. When you land on a square with a yellow arrow, 1 is subtracted from d. One of the mazes has blank squares, which you may not land on.

Notes: There are eight different maze layouts here. The rules are based on a maze called “Alice in Mazeland” in my 1990 book Mad Mazes. When I wrote that book it never occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have several mazes with the same rules. The layout for the original “Alice in Mazeland” became Maze 5 in this program, and, actually, it’s the least interesting of the eight mazes.

Here are my favorites among these mazes: I like Maze 1 because it has a lot of complexity for its small size. Maze 4 is interesting and very complex—its shortest solution is 73 moves. Maze 7 does interesting things with loops and is probably the most complex of these mazes, even though its shortest solution is only 57 moves. Maze 7 was a “Puzzle of the Week” on www.mathpuzzle.com. That site now has a list of solvers along with interesting comments from the solvers at this address. Maze 8 is a little silly, but it adds a new twist to mazes-with-rules.

When you solve one of these mazes, the program outputs a code that looks something like: Code=842. The number doesn’t mean anything, but you might use it to prove to a friend that you solved a particular maze. Or you might set up a contest where people should solve one or more of these mazes, then e-mail you the numbers that follow Code=.

The maze design and the JavaScript program is copyright © 2001 by Robert Abbott. If you are interested in programming this game for a different device (PDA, cell phone, video game controller), please see my terms of use.

My thanks to “Joker” for supplying me with a Java applet that plays the sound files (I was having trouble getting JavaScript to play sound on all browsers).


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This program won't work because you need to have Java as well as JavaScript enabled.