Digital Mazes

Mazes have all been a favorite of puzzles for me. They can appear so simple but can be confusingly complex at the same time. Mazes can also be quite intriguing when combined with digital effects. Some digital mazes that I have created all serve the purpose of being solvable as well as an incorporated piece of digital art perfect for display on a desktop computer or a wall in the home as a poster print or photo frame. Now lets look at the fundamentals of mazes.

Just what is a maze? A maze is a system of simple to complex passages designed to perplex those who walk through the passages from the point of entrance to the exit. Mazes often contain dead ends where one will have to backtrack and then proceed through a different passage in order to find the exit. The hedge or garden maze is one example of such a structure as well as hand drawn mazes. The focus here will be on computer generated mazes. Mazes can be created in all levels of difficulty from very easy to very difficult depending on the number of cells used in generated the puzzle. Different algorithms will produce certain types of mazes such as well as the the solution to the maze itself. They can be created in all shapes and patterns such as square, triangular, rectangular, round and so forth. Computer mazes have endless possibilities in their makeup and solving levels which is why they are enjoyable to create as well as solving them. No two mazes are the same unless duplicate copies of the same maze are created.

As a digital artist I like to take a plain and simple maze and sometimes add special effects and backgrounds to give the maze a much more interesting appearance. Thus it becomes a designer maze which would create an interesting piece of digital artwork all in itself. An excellent source of information about mazes can be found at Daedalus. This site covers everything one can learn about mazes including the types of mazes, creation and solving of mazes. There is also a free maze generator program offered which covers an extensive range of maze algorithms and solving tools. This program can take some time to grasp but will produce some very interesting results. One can even create 3D mazes as well.