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Möbius Mazes

Explore the concept of Möbius strip mazes by understanding their single-sided surface and how to create them using a custom grid class. Learn techniques to design mazes that wrap with a 180° twist, visualize the grid layout, and align maze edges properly. This lesson guides you through generating the maze on a doubled-width grid and rendering it for practical folding and assembly, enabling you to create and experiment with these distinctive puzzle structures.

Comprehending Mobius mazes

A Möbius strip (sometimes spelled Moebius, or Möbius) is a novel surface with only a single side. You can make one easily by taking a strip of paper, giving one end a 180° twist, and then taping the two ends together. The result (assuming we used checkered paper) would look something like this:

An illustration of a Möbius strip
An illustration of a Möbius strip

An ant crawling along the surface of this strip of paper would find that it had traversed both sides before returning to its starting point. Like magic!

This appears to be a very suitable surface for a maze design, and it turns out that we can do so with very little effort. It’s actually very much like a cylinder maze, but with a twist—literally! We need to take that cylinder maze and give it a 180° twist. That's where we face a challenge. A cylinder maze only needs to exist on a single side of the paper since it ...