The Bureaucratic Maze   

July 3, 2003:   This was the first time I was first able to try the maze. It was at the Mensa Annual Gathering in St. Paul, Minnesota. Here is a picture from that event:

When you enter the maze you are given a form that says, “Take this to the desk labeled Human Resources.” You look for the desk with the nameplate Human Resources, you hand in your form to the bureaucrat at that desk, and he gives you another form. This one says, “Take this form to Information Management or Marketing.” Hmm, there is now a choice. Let’s say you decide to go to Information Management. You hand in your form and receive one that says, “Take this form to Employee Benefits or Marketing.” You decide on Employee Benefits where you receive a form saying, “Take this form to Corporate Compliance or Human Resources.”

This can go on for a long time, and you’re not told where the goal is or even what the goal is. But if you make enough right choices, you’ll get a form that says, “Congratulations, you solved the maze.”

Here’s something else you aren’t told: Your current position in the maze does not just depend on what desk you’re going to. It depends on what desk you’re going to plus what desk you’re coming from. Most people eventually figure this out.

Each of the five “bureaucrats” has four different sets of forms to give out, and the maze participants can come to his desk from any of four other desks. When a participant hands in a form, the bureaucrat looks at the form to see where it came from (this information is in a number that is buried in some bureaucratese on the form). The bureaucrat then gives the participant the proper form.

As you can see, this maze uses a lot of resources. You need 50 copies (or more) of 22 different forms, you need five desks, and you need five volunteers to be the five bureaucrats. A sixth volunteer to be a “greeter” is a help, and even more volunteers might be a good idea to help get the forms back to the desks where they originated (in case the supply of forms runs low).

So—how did this maze work out in practice? At the Mensa gathering it worked pretty well. There were about thirty participants. Half of them gave up fairly soon (that happens in most of my mazes) but the other half became fascinated and kept going until they solved it. The average time to solve the maze was 45 minutes. Most of those who stuck with it realized that they needed to take notes; so not only were there players carrying forms from desk to desk but there were players standing around scribbling notes. Also, the volunteers who acted as the bureaucrats all told me they had a lot of fun.

March 25, 2004:   The second time I tried the maze was on this date at the Gathering for Gardner convention in Atlanta. This is a convention of people involved with various forms of recreational mathematics. The maze again worked pretty well, but it wasn’t a big hit. One problem was that it was scheduled as an activity for early arrivals to the conference, and there weren’t too many early arrivals. In the room where the maze took place, there were people registering for the conference at one end, and at the other end people were putting together a very weird sculpture by George Hart. The desks for the five bureaucrats were scattered around the rest of the room. The maze fit well into this chaos (after all, the purpose of a maze is to create chaos), but only eight people entered the maze. Three of them solved it, and these three said it was great. One of the solvers, James Stephens, said the interaction with the others in the maze was interesting. He’d pass the same person again and again, and it seemed like neither of them was getting anywhere. Well, yes, that interaction is good, but there would have been a lot more interaction if more people had been in the maze.

I got an interesting comment from two people who did not solve the maze. They said they kept going around what appeared to be an endless loop (it really wasn’t, but all the false paths eventually send you back to Human Resources so you can start over). They figured that the maze intended to show that getting trapped in a bureaucracy is like being in an endless loop. Once they figured that out, they didn’t need to pursue the maze any further. Hmm. I never took the bureaucratic theme seriously; it was just something I added after I created the mechanism for the maze. But a lot of people do take this theme seriously. Maybe the maze could become more popular for its theme than for the puzzle aspects.