Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/09/popular-science-challenge-can.html
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I’m seeing many ways through, so I must not be comprehending “you can’t double back through the same dot twice in a row.”
Does “touching” a dot and then reversing direction count as “doubl(ing) back through the same dot twice in a row?”
I assumed you can’t reverse direction. You’re like a pac man ghost (and no one’s eating power dots)
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I did the maze backwards and it really helped a lot. Solving the end game is pretty critical so I started there.
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Popular Science challenge: can you make it through the world’s hardest maze
…and by that I assume you mean Popular Science’s website. holy shit, scrolling through their site is like someone’s nephew binge-ate every CMS template they could find and then barfed them continuously onto a computer screen.
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Pretty sure you have to pass through a dot, bumping it but not going through isn’t a legitimate move if that’s what you mean by touching and reversing. I also don’t think there are multiple (or at least not many) ways through (discounting just adding repeating loops) since if you work backwards from the finish there’s only a single legal path for a good portion of the maze.
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Seconded. Backwards, there was only one decision point (place where more than one path was available to choose)…
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… Wait, so the point is to blow through all the signs telling me over and over again that what’s at the end is a deadly radioactive biohazard?
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World’s most difficult maze?
Brother - I’ve already been though PennDot.
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Aren’t you going through the same dot twice in a row several times there?
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My path passes through the same dot twice, but does not (double back / touch dot then make a U-turn / just touch the dot and immediately reverse away from it)
I guess I was reading the rule as you can’t hit the same dot twice, which definitely does make the maze challenging.
No, his path doesn’t go through the same dot twice in a row. Really the “can’t double back” rule seems completely unnecessary to me, because of course you can’t because then you wouldn’t be following the already established color order rule. You can go through the same dot twice (not in a row) because it says you can pass through any dot as often as you like.
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Hmm. I’d like to look at the maze, but PopSci has an anti-adblocker script. Oh well.
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Can you make it through the world’s hardest maze?
You mean the DMV?
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I saw your blurred version of the solved maze, I thought it was a mis-post from If you stare at this image, it allegedly "disappears" | Boing Boing. I can stare at it and make it completely disappear!
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It seems to work even better than the one on that post!
Maybe they meant the “world’s hardest maze to make”, or something like that, because it was way too easy to solve backwards, to be world’s hardest to solve.
Maybe the more difficult challenge is the ethical qualm over whether or not it’s “cheating to work backward”. Is there a consensus within the world’s maze solving community about that? I mean, if it were something like a life-size hedge maze with no access to the end from outside, well, I guess that’d be something like “fun”, as an imagination exercise; but won’t every soluble maze eventually fall to a diligent attempt to follow every possible route?
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I don’t think it’s that hard to solve going forward either. I poked around and found a solution within a minute or so.
