A Biting Maze

A conventional maze is a set of walls or hedges enclosing roughly a rectangular plot of ground. One enters from the outside of the rectangle and wants to exit somewhere else to the outside of the rectangle. A well-known strategy to guarantee to exit such a maze is to keep your left hand on the wall and walk forward. Eventually you will reach the exit.

For example, consider the simple maze in Figure 1-10.

Figure 1-10: You are to travel this maze from entrance to exit by keeping your left hand on the wall and walking forward. Will you make it?

Keep your left hand on the wall at the entrance at the bottom and walk forward. This will lead you under the T shaped wall (though you will never touch it), up and above the entrance to the right, eventually to the bottom left corner (labeled A), then B, and then the dead end at C. But the left hand strategy will lead you out of this dead end until you will finally approach the exit from the left. This is certainly not the most efficient way to go through the maze, but it is guaranteed to work.

Warm-Up

Can you see why this strategy will always work on any maze whose entrance and exit are gaps in the outside wall?

Solution to Warm-Up

Imagine that the exterior wall surfaces of the maze are painted black and the interior wall surfaces are painted white. Imagine that as you walk, you draw a line with your left hand using a crayon. Even though your path may not seem to be efficient, it ensures that you never go over the same section of white wall twice until you get to the exterior of the maze (and hit a black surface). There is clearly only a finite amount of white wall surface between the entrance and the first exterior point of the maze. Therefore, you will eventually get out. (By symmetry, a right hand on the right wall will also work.)

This next puzzle, however, escapes the limitations of the physical world because the maze is on the Web. So there is no analogue to putting your left hand on the wall - even if you always go left, you could go in a circle.

The first Web page is at http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/shasha/papers/mazebook.d/f43.html. You want to get to a Web page that tells you (albeit in code) that you have arrived. There are hints along the way.

1. The challenge is to find a route to the final page, and to decrypt the words and phrases on the way. There are hints in the encrypted words (they form a sentence about natural history) and in other parts of the Web page. Give it a try.