ALICE MAZES: Unlike Alice in Wonderland, you won't grow or shrink as you play these mazes. But the distance you travel will get larger or smaller.

This maze won't work, because you need to have both Java and JavaScript enabled.
If you're using Internet Explorer, it can be tricky trying to figure out how to enable JavaScript. Here's a hint: IE doesn't even call it "JavaScript." Instead, they call it "active content" or "Active Scripting" or "Scripting."

Alice Maze



										Restart the current maze
										Start Maze 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
										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. Two of these mazes has blank squares, which you may not land on.

Notes: There are eleven different 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 8 in this program, and, actually, it’s the least interesting of the eleven mazes.

I programmed eight of these mazes in 2001, and recently (April, 2009) I added three mazes at the beginning. Maze 1 is a simple, introductory maze. Mazes 2 and 3 were also supposed to be simple, but I got carried away and added some some tricky parts to them. Maze 7 is interesting and very complex—its shortest solution is 73 moves. Maze 10 does interesting things with loops and is probably the most complex of these mazes, even though its shortest solution is only 57 moves. Back in 2001, that maze was a “Puzzle of the Week” on www.mathpuzzle.com. That site still has a list of solvers along with some interesting comments at this address. By the way, the comments refer to Maze 7, which was the maze’s number at the time. The final maze, number 11, is a little silly, but it adds a new twist to the concept of 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.