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Maze (Posted on 2002-06-26) Difficulty: 3 of 5
You're trapped in a maze. There is a way out. Path junctions are all 3-way.

If you use the strategy of always taking the path going right, what will happen?

(Note: This problem is deliberarely vague.)

See The Solution Submitted by Cheradenine    
Rating: 2.5556 (9 votes)

Comments: ( Back to comment list | You must be logged in to post comments.)
re: About the | Comment 24 of 54 |
(In reply to About the "official" solution by TomM)

Actually, it's worse than that. Imagine a maze with a topology like that of a ladder. Twist the ladder into a circle and join the ends of the "inner" support. Now you have two concentric rings, one of them broken, with many passages joining them. The number of nodes can be arbitrarily large. A wall-following strategy starting at an "inner" node will always fail. There's only a 1/3 chance that you'll reach the exit if you start on an outer node (unless you happen to start at one of the nodes adjoining the break, but the odds of this happening become negligible as n becomes large). The consequence? A large n leads to a 1/6 chance that you will eventually reach an exit.

I'm afraid this problem was not well thought out.
  Posted by friedlinguini on 2002-07-02 06:18:43

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