Cylinder Mazes

Introduction to planair mazes

It’s been an eventful journey, but we’re nearly done. Maze algorithms, grids born of nonrectangular tesselations, circles, weaves, and braids, and even building those mazes out in three and four dimensions—it’s all brought us here.

Consider the mazes we’ve generated up to now, all of them neatly built on flat, predictable surfaces. Even the three-dimensional ones were composed of neatly planar levels. But what would happen if we were to take one of those mazes and bend it a bit, warping the surface so that it curves in one or more dimensions? What if you were to even go so far as to fold it?

Those ...