Maze Generator
The two words are used interchangeably today, but puzzle historians keep them apart. A labyrinth has a single path that winds to the centre and back with no choices. A maze branches, and the solver can go wrong. The generator makes mazes; set twistiness to zero on a small polar grid and it comes close to a labyrinth.
Ancient labyrinths
The oldest labyrinth designs are unicursal: one path, no dead ends. The seven-circuit pattern found on coins from Knossos on Crete, associated with the story of the Minotaur, is the best known. Similar designs appear carved into rock in Sardinia, Spain and Scandinavia, and laid in stones on the Baltic coast. They were walked as ritual, not solved as puzzle.
Church labyrinths
Medieval cathedrals, most famously Chartres, set eleven-circuit labyrinths into their floors. Pilgrims walked them as a substitute for a journey. Again there was no choice to make; the point was the winding path itself.
The hedge maze
Branching mazes as entertainment appear in the Renaissance garden. The hedge maze at Hampton Court, planted in the 1690s, is the oldest surviving one in Britain and one of the first with genuine dead ends. Garden mazes spread across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the idea of the maze as a test of wits, rather than a meditative walk, took hold.
Paper mazes
Printed mazes for children arrived with cheap colour printing in the late nineteenth century and became a fixture of activity books and newspaper puzzle pages in the twentieth. Most were drawn by hand, and the best illustrators built themes and pictures into the walls.
Computer mazes
Once computers could draw, mazes became a favourite programming exercise. The algorithms in this tool date from that period: Prim's and Kruskal's were written for network problems in the 1950s and adapted to mazes; the recursive backtracker appears in hobbyist listings from the 1980s. Screen-based mazes also gave rise to a genre of video games, from early arcade titles to modern first-person puzzle games.
Today
Mazes are still cut into maize fields every autumn, printed by the million in puzzle books, and used in psychology labs to study how people and animals learn routes. The pleasure has not changed much since the first hedge was planted: a clear goal, a few wrong turns, and the small satisfaction of the way out.