The shortest path requires you to go to Room 29 where the secret Door 17 lies on the table. It’s the only true way into Room 17 which leads to 45.

I am not sure if anyone is still working on this. I just finished the shortest path and when I came to see if my answer was correct I ended up finding that ppl didn’t differently even though it still does not make sense to me why they skipped door number 16 from room 4. I mean ppl are already finding that 17 is the missing door by searching through the book, and so it could totally be door 16 the same way because the hole there leads to room 32 then 28 then 45.

I want a solution that doesn’t expect readers to go through the whole book first. I think the shortest path can only occur after ppl are already lost through the book. It is the only way.

The fact that it goes down doesn’t seem like an issue in this place. It isn’t unique in that regard. Other vertical passages just don’t have this sort of door on them, for obvious reasons.

I don’t know, man, I feel like this is one of the best puzzle aspects in the book!

However, I actually think the path from 29 to 17 is one of the weakest points in the book. Manson constructed Maze in such a way that, to preserve the difficulty of the core path, required the center to be obscured from either the direction of entry or exit. This is so the 16 step path can’t be brute-forced.

And so one door is hidden. But it’s not a door, really, is it? It’s still a table, it just looks like a door when the page is upside-down… also just sorta, because it’s still parallel to the floor in a very un-doorlike way. I think disguising a door was a fine solution for the bottleneck problem, but Manson still invited brute-forcing with 29. If you don’t find the door to 17, which isn’t unlikely (how many of us did?) you might just map out every connection from 1 to the center and see where the blind spot is.

This shark-jumping could have been balanced out by the room being simpler—perhaps being a dead-end like 35. It could’ve even been a room like 24 with no identifiable exit, but the text could refute that. At the very least the room could’ve been decrowded a little. I guess Manson didn’t want to make anything easy so deep into the Maze, but the difficulty of getting to room 17 feels different than the difficult of parsing other rooms. It’s less of a puzzle problem (you will quickly find out if you dislike Maze’s puzzles) and more of a structure problem.

Maze is perhaps my favorite book ever published, but I don’t think it’s beyond critique. Obviously 29 to 17 is intended, but I think the second half of your comment is what DEFINITIVELY proves that, Rob, because using clues to break the Maze’s rules muddies the waters. I think Manson kind of invited that with 29-17, and I don’t blame people for getting confused about it.

(oldnslo186‘s explanation about the path not being verifiable doesn’t make much sense to me, though— if it’s about the one-way stuff, you could just say the unmarked door in 17 is the 29 entrance. Don’t know if I’m missing anything there.)

That means I have yet to comment my thoughts on any of the room pages here, so apologies(?) in advance if I end up typing a lot in quick succession across the site. Right now I am just reading through the chat logs and partial solutions as to familiarize myself with what has already been said, and I will try not to repeat any of those ideas.

Looking forward to working with everyone!