clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
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appendix e<br />
four-dimensional mazes<br />
So long as we have not become aware that the presence of God is a<br />
space, encompassing the whole of reality just as the three-dimensional<br />
space does, so long as we conceive the world of God only as the upper<br />
story of the cosmic space, so long will God's activity, too, always be a<br />
force which affects earthly events only from above.<br />
—Karl Heim, Christian Faith and Natural Science<br />
Mazes are difficult to solve in two and three dimensions, but can you imagine how<br />
difficult it would be to solve a 4-D maze? Chris Okasaki, from Carnegie Mellon<br />
University's School of Computer Science, is one of the world's leading experts on<br />
4-D mazes. When I asked him to describe his 4-D mazes, he replied:<br />
My 4-D mazes are two-dimensional grids of two-dimensional grids.<br />
Each of the subgrids looks like a set of rooms with some of the walls<br />
missing, allowing the maze-solver to travel directly between certain<br />
rooms. In addition, each room may have a set of arrows in it, pointing<br />
North, South, East, and West. The arrows mean that you can travel<br />
directly between this room and the corresponding room in the next<br />
subgrid in that direction. For example, ina2X2X2X2 maze, if<br />
you are in the upper left corner of the upper left subgrid, an arrow<br />
pointing south means that you can travel to the upper left corner of<br />
the lower left subgrid.<br />
Mathematically, the mazes I generate are based on "random spanning<br />
trees" of some graph representing all the possible connections<br />
between rooms. Contrary to what you might expect, however, random<br />
spanning trees do not make very good mazes. The problem is that they<br />
have far too many obvious dead-ends, which do not lure the person<br />
solving the maze into exploring them. Therefore, I post-process each<br />
random spanning tree to convert a tree with many short dead-ends<br />
into one with fewer, longer dead-ends.<br />
A 4-D grid is no harder to model as a graph than a 2-D grid, so my<br />
software can generate 4-D mazes just by starting with the appropriate<br />
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