Some mazes

Tokyo subway model by Takatsugu Kuriyama (via)

Claustrophobia plus - do it in the dark as a team-building exercise? (via)

Aspects of a more "normal" experience of the classic hedge maze

New to me - the arrow maze -

"Arrow mazes, also known as vector mazes or directional mazes, consist of cells that are connected by arrows. You can move to adjacent cells if the cell you are in has an arrow pointing to them.... If you go one way, you cannot necessarily go back, so it is possible to get stuck."

A maze transforms into a tree -

whereas a labyrinth transforms into a loop (see it happening here).

A maze being generated (watch it here; this would make some interesting "blackwork" embroidery) -

Again, new to me - a new category - a sparse maze (from a site that's useful for defininitions of categories and "operations") -

"one that doesn't carve passage through every cell, where some are left uncreated. This amounts to having inaccessible locations .... A similar concept can be applied when adding walls, resulting in an irregular maze with wide passages and rooms.  ...  Sparse mazes are produced by choosing to not grow the maze in areas that would violate the rule of sparseness. A consistent way to implement this is to, whenever considering a new cell to carve into, to first check all cells within a semicircle of chosen cell radius located forward in the current direction. If any of those cells is already part of the maze, don't allow the cell being considered, since doing to would be too close to an existing cell and hence make the maze not sparse." Hmm, there's something basic I don't understand - "carve passage"? "uncreated cells"? "growing the maze"? "allowing a cell"? Sure enough, it's computer-speak; maze programs abound (here's another one - it created the sparse maze below).

More categories of mazes -

This next maze isn't real ... but if it were, and had a hole that a marble could drop through, and you manoeuvred the marble by tilting the maze ... when it dropped through, there could be another layer

and you could manoeuvre the marble .... ad infinitum .... This is hands-on and would be about holding the toy, finely adjusting the balance (it's a big toy!), enjoying the haptic feedback, improving handling skills. And there's a bit of looking ahead and planning ahead. G'wan, someone ... make one ... If the layers were transparent, it would get harder and harder to manoeuvre the marble, the further down it went, because of the visual interference of the layers above it.

Megacities are a sort of 3D maze; when maps are mazes, in areas of high density, what to leave out becomes important. The term "pedestrian mapping" is is a reminder that this research is about how a museum resembles a maze/labyrinth, so pedestrian mapping will be my next area of investigation.

(via)