At 8 levels deep, I saw David Hasselhoff

January 18, 2005 4:24 PM

Fractal Maze, one of the most evil puzzles I have ever encountered. It's documented briefly at mathpuzzle.com (scroll down a bit), which also features a smaller fractal maze.
posted by Wolfdog (16 comments total)

Doesn't seem to work well in Firefox on my Mac; sorry. But it runs great in Safari and IE. I recommend turning color on.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:25 PM on January 18, 2005

Man... I'm lost. I don't even know where to begin.
posted by ORthey at 4:37 PM on January 18, 2005

Can someone explain what this is? I don't get it...
posted by orangskye at 4:38 PM on January 18, 2005

Wow, never realized what the price of internet fame/infamy was, from mathpuzzle.com:

My site's getting hammered hard by Metafilter (10 Jan 2005) and an army of related bloggers. (welcome, Metafilter)! If I was still on Earthlink, I'd need to pay about $7000 in overage charges. Fortunately, I'm with Yahoo now, so if I go over my 200GB bandwidth limit this month, each extra GB will only cost $1, instead of the $100 that Earthlink charges.

posted by substrate at 4:44 PM on January 18, 2005

You begin at the minus sign and need to reach the plus sign. Each of the lettered boxes is a copy of the full maze. You'll have to recurse through 1 or more boxes to go from (-) to (+).

An explanation on the same page as the puzzle would've been nice.
posted by substrate at 4:46 PM on January 18, 2005

Let me give a little rundown, 'cause it took me a while to figure out the rules too.

The goal is to get the little marble from - to +.

You can click on the "pins" to make a move along any of the wires. For instance, your first move could be to the third pin on top of chip A.

Now, you enter "chip A', which contains another copy of the whole maze. Your marble appears on the third pin at the top.

Your next move could be to, say, the fourth pin on top of chip F, in which you'd be inside ANOTHER copy of the maze. Or, you could start to leave chip A by moving to the fourth pin on the right side of the screen.

Every time you enter a chip, you're going a level deeper, and the object is not only to get to the +, but to get to the top-level plus. So if you enter chips A, F, then B, you'd have to leave B, leave F, and leave A to be back at the top again.

(Once you get the idea, it's brilliant — but still crazy hard.)
posted by Wolfdog at 4:46 PM on January 18, 2005

Thanks bunches! Now off to see how smart I am...
posted by orangskye at 4:48 PM on January 18, 2005

each extra GB will only cost $1, instead of the $100 that Earthlink charges

$100/GB? That oughta be illegal.
posted by punishinglemur at 4:54 PM on January 18, 2005

Wow, never realized what the price of internet fame/infamy was, from mathpuzzle.com:


Ha! Jan 10th. That must be because of my cyclopedia post! :) Sorry, Ed...
posted by vacapinta at 4:54 PM on January 18, 2005

Nothing I click on does anything. This is great!

WITTY HTML SARCASM ESCAPE THINGY GOES HERE!

I am going back to driving the truck. That I understood. They explain how to do it right on the thing! This page gets a zero for useability.
posted by Eideteker at 6:17 PM on January 18, 2005

Eideteker gets an A in illiteracy for not reading the first comment which notes it tends not to work in Firefox.
posted by mek at 7:01 PM on January 18, 2005

You know, every friday I weed through FLASH FRIDAY posts saying things like, "OMG WTF SO ADDICTIVE! GOODBYE WORKDAY! WHEEEEEEE!" yawn.

Then, on a tuesday of all days, along comes Wolfdog with this innocuous post and BAM! my workday's over and I've accomplished nothing.

Damn you, Wolfdog! You'll rue the day you ever crossed paths with me!
posted by shmegegge at 7:28 PM on January 18, 2005

I solved it eventually just by clicking around a lot. I wouldn't have a clue where to start if I had to actually, you know, logically figure out a solution.
posted by boaz at 7:38 PM on January 18, 2005

Thanks for an enjoyable three hours or so of analysis. Managed to find a 10-move solution, which (unless I've made a mistake) at the very least is minimal without going more levels "deep" than this solution does.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 5:52 AM on January 19, 2005

wstfl. I think that I've managed to get lost!

Now I know how the BSOD happens - it's when an electron gets all confused, and recurses infinitely through the fractal complexities of the P4 processor :-)
posted by Chunder at 5:58 AM on January 19, 2005

Yay, another "doesn't work in Mozilla" page.
posted by knave at 6:46 AM on January 19, 2005