my rats when i had them would probably just have climbed over the walls to get to the tasty snack
“Any corner will do, from there just keep making right turns. It may not be the optimal path, but it will get you out of the maze.”
mfw the maze has a loop
Think it through. That doesn’t really have any bearing. You follow a wall and turn right whenever you have the option. You’ll exit the loop the same way you came in and continue through the rest of the maze.
Imagine walking clockwise around an city block. You keep turning right, but just circle the block, never leaving it. Same concept.
Yep, you caught me, I forgot to mention the very obvious detail that you shouldn’t repeat paths that you’ve already taken unless your back tracking take a new branch. But also, mazes and city grids are two very different topological spaces, so not really applicable anyway.
Actually, I thought about it again and I think you’re right. If they always take right turns, or in other words, trace their hands along the right wall and never let their hand leave the wall, then they’ll never enter a loop in the first place.
A loop implies an “island” in the maze. Following the right-hand rule, you might go around the island. But to get stuck in the loop, you would have to have your right hand along the wall of the island, and naturally since it’s an island, to put your wall on the island in the first place requires taking your hand off the wall you were originally tracing, breaking the right-hand rule.
However importantly they have to follow the rule from the very beginning. So you can’t just initiate in the middle, like the rats might do in OP’s comic.
I think you may have also been thinking about labyrinths, which only have a single path
I wonder, what was the last actual lab rat experiment that had a maze?
Have we reached the limits of maze-based science?
Or are there frontiers yet to be explored?
Asking the right questions
get out of this closed off circle
