Mazes!

quotes from Wanderlust: a history of walking by Rebecca Solnit

"A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation..."

"...I understood the morals of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one."

Essentially mazes are a network of winding paths. There are usually dead ends in the designed paths, mazes are meant to be a puzzle to be solved. There is a goal which is the center of the maze. Mazes soul purpose is to confusing the walker or visitor within. They do have a moral significance as well which has been expressed in the quote above. Well what is a labyrinth? There is a difference between a maze and a labyrinth. To qualify as a maze the design must have some choice or branches in the path. A labyrinth design only has one path. Maze designs were simple at first and developed rapidly. In fact maze designs were originally developed from the simplistic labyrinth design, the walls were rearranged to create paths with choice and branches. There are five basic types of mazes however not all mazes fall into these categories perfectly.

Simply-connected Maze:
This particular maze design is formed from one unbroken wall with many branches. If the wall surrounding the goal of the maze is linked to the perimeter at the entrance, the maze can be solved by keeping a hand on the wall.

Multiply- connected Maze 
Here the goal or center of the maze is isolated from the perimeter wall, set in an island of barriers therefore defeating solving the maze with hand to wall contact, this increases the difficulty.

Three-dimensional maze
Traditional mazes with hedge walls appear three dimensional but really the pathways are two dimensional. Here we have a idea that has been present since the nineteenth century but has only existed on paper until the early 1980's. Bridges and underpasses adds to the complexity of the maze and allows the goal to be completely isolated with only a bridge link.

Conditional movement maze 
This maze design assists the walker with dictated moves or instructions. This allows the paths to be very intricate but occupy limited space. Present an entertaining intellectual challenge and are popular in educational context specifically mathematical and scientific aspects.

Interactive maze
This particular maze design is high-tech. This concept is the most interesting to me personally. The layout responds to the actions of the visitors. Computer timed barriers and other devices such as motion sensors are used to calculate the physical custom of the walker.

here is an interesting website link i came across that relates to mazes and labyrinths, it has a bit of a different subject with mazes than walking but i thought it is worth sharing:
www.dgp.toronto.edu/~karan/maze/

also if your interested in taking a trip there is a hedge maze on Toronto island
wikimapia.org/#lat=43.6180191&lon=-79.3725622&z=18&l=0&m=b