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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 />

190

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