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…a middle-class drawing room or parlor. It was amazing how much more comfortable they felt in these surroundings.
Everyone sat down, some on the floor, and chatted about where they had been and where they should go.
“Magpies!” I said to myself. “Not a real thought in their heads.”
They were so much at ease they almost missed what the room was telling them altogether. They finally got the message, which I thought was pretty obvious, and we went on to…
- Images and text copyright 1985 by Christopher Manson
used with permission. [Purchase MAZE from Amazon]
Room Type: LOOP Doors: 10 25 30
Solution Summary: [COLLECTION CURATED BY WHITE Raven. SEE COMMENTS FOR ADDITIONAL SOLUTION PROPOSALS.]
● The “YES” “MAYBE” and “NO” signs refer to the spaces over the doors. There is no sign over the unmarked door. No – you cannot take this door. The 25 sign is hanging by one nail, half up and half down. Maybe – you could take this door. The 10 sign is fully up. Yes – you should take this door. [Credit with a hint: H. Goyteki] [Credit: White Raven] This solution is reinforced by the open arrangement of the doors. The blank space over the unmarked door is the same orientation as the “NO” sign (facing to the left). The “MAYBE” sign is the same orientation (pointed straight at the viewer) as the 25 sign. The “YES” sign is the same orientation as the 10 sign (facing to the right). [Independent Credit: Aria | White Raven] Reinforcing this further, the arm of the person leaving (signifying “go”) points up through the “YES” sign to the “10″ sign. [Credit: Dave Gentile] Also the narrow corner of the 10 sign and the narrow corner of the “YES” sign point like an arrow to one another, while the narrow corner of the “MAYBE” sign and the narrow corner of the 25 sign point to one another. [Credit: Aria] [See Related Images]
● On the sign “JIBE PINE COMPASS” all point to the word “needle.” A jibe (not the boating term) is an insulting quip, which is sometimes called a needle. A pine tree has needles, as do compasses. There are three things with eyes — a needle, a potato, the ship in the painting. [Credit: Owen Hammer / Jimmy Williams] The picture on the right is not the Washington Monument but an obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle. [Credit: Naomi Alderman] The needle represents the number one while the eye represents a zero. “Needle”&”Eye”=10 the number of the correct door. [Independent Credit: David Gentile | White Raven] Needles have eyes thus every needle reference can be seen as both a 1 and a 0, [Credit: vewatkin]
● The ship in the painting is sailing toward Door 10, the correct door, indicating that we travel in that direction. [Independent Credit: SP | White Raven] The phrase, “…and chatted about where they had been and where they should go.” Is a reference to the ship travelling from the direction of the unmarked door (where they had been) to Door 10 (where they should go). [Independent Credit: vewatkin | White Raven]
● The walking cane labeled “QUICK” which is pointing at door 25 is a hurry-cane/”hurricane” [Credit: Owen Hammer] this warns against entering door 25. [Independent Credit: SP | White Raven] This solution is reinforced by the sailing ship solution above. [Independent Credit: Aria | White Raven] This may also be reinforced by the night scene picture being behind the stern of the ship, cloudy in the picture of the ship, with light ahead. [Credit: SP]
● The 25 door and unmarked door are both in shaded, whereas the 10 door is lit up in comparison. [Independent Credit: Wanderer | White Raven] Combining this with the solutions above, the sailing ship must go past the hurricane toward the light. [Independent Credit: Aria | White Raven]
● The downward arrows on the wallpaper and reference in the text to “Everyone sat down, some on the floor…” directs our attention to the floor. There are 10 visible feet on the furniture, indicating door 10. [Credit: vewatkin] The foot of the man leaving draws our attention to the feet of the furniture – this hints that we should “follow the feet.” The chair (in the center) has 8 feet, the furniture on the left or right has one foot each, 8+1+1=10. [Credit: White Raven]
● The stripes on the couch pair with the squares on the pillow to create an approximation of a 10. The line of the monument pairs with the circle of the moon to make a 10. [Independent Credit: David G | White Raven] The line of the mast pairs with the circle of the eye on the ship to make a 10. [Credit: White Raven] The ship’s “mast” is actually a glowing white rope making the 1 more evident. [Credit: vewatkin]
● The lines in the chair pair with the eyes in the potato to make an approximation of 10. [Credit: vewatkin]
● In the text is the word “felt” which is an anagram for “left.” In this room as well as the other two rooms in which the word “felt” occurs (11, 25) the correct door is the the left door. [Credit: Hidden Mystery / Beelzebibble]
● The text reads, “”Magpies!” I said to myself. “Not a real thought in their heads.”" “Magpies” is a reference to the fortune telling device from the 1700s turned nursery rhyme commonly referred to as “One For Sorrow.” [Independent Credit: Aria | White Raven]
The line, “Not a real thought in their heads.” may be a reference to the superstitious nature of the rhyme. A popular version of the rhyme reads…
“One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a wedding
Four for a birth
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret not to be told
Eight for a wish
Nine for a kiss
Ten for a bird you must not miss”
The last line refers to not missing a golden opportunity, in this case the correct door, 10. [Credit: White Raven]
But yes – it is a trick. It is clearly intended that you find all the eyes, then find the needles and then think of the eye of the needle and lump them all together. There is a very clear pattern – everything in I/eye related. The problem is – it does not get you an exit. So you have to go against the grain. Un-unify and un-simplify which is the opposite of normal procedure. But by backing up one step you suddenly have a working model that gives to tons of correct results. And that makes it the better model in spite of its greater complexity.
vewatkins – if it helps (probably not) – I do not think you are supposed to ignore the “eye” of the needles, you are supposed to find both. Needle eyes can be zeros. Needle shafts can be “1″. The letter I can be a one. Eyes can be a zero.
In room 41 there is a certain amount of room 10 misdirection you could come up with, and that is pretty standard. Maybe even a little more than normal. I count two clues to the round sort of eyes. And 10 is the 2nd best choice after all. But at least in my view the room level puzzle is quite decisive. At the end of the day, if you’ve solved all the puzzles in the room (and it seems we have only gotten started by Raven’s count), you are quite clear on what the correct exit is.
I think the reason everyone is so perturbed with these solutions is because it would set a different precedent for solving puzzles elsewhere (read: a lower standard). It changes qualitative and quantitative into interpretive deduction. Since MAZE is a work of sheer genius I will give this a pass, but I sincerely hope this is the loosest room open to interpretation. I used the Lewis Test (a test to see if a non-mazer buys the solution) and got some raised eyebrows (I explained some solid solutions to compare, and they were on board without eyebrows).
My particular problem with Room 34 has not been that it clued linear objects (needles) with roughly circular objects (eyes) and required you to think of the shapes of those objects as more-or-less matching the shapes of the room solution. At least, not in the abstract. My problems with the solution is that by choosing an object that very prominently has an eye (a needle), and requiring us to ignore the eye aspect of that word while embracing the eye-aspect of the Argo and the potato, creates a sort of analytic freedom that us to find 10s in pretty much any room of the Maze.
Now, I don’t mean to be silly in that regard; 34 is obviously hinting at needles and eyes in a way that most rooms won’t be pointedly cluing straight objects and circular objects. And the needles suggested in the room, from Cleopatra’s Needle to the three types of needles listed on the paper, are all needles that don’t have eyes. Also, “needle” is clued twice, which may be a reasonable indicator that it means more than just another “eye” object.
But that’s still a sort of looseness in taking a room full of “eye” clues, taking some of them to mean “circles,” and others to mean “nothing to do with eyes, their actual shapes are like 1; except ‘jibe’ doesn’t have a shape so you should just be understanding that bit to clue to the general concept of a needle, which is shaped like a 1; but don’t think of a needle with an eye, or, if you do, ignore the fact that it has an eye.”
You could say, “No, the whole POINT is that needles and eyes go together. That’s why the room has those clues.” But the problem with that is that needles don’t “go together” with eyes in that sense. Needles have eyes, the eyes are parts of the needle, just like the eyes on a potato or the eye on the Argo. It’s not salt and pepper, or ham and cheese, or Abbott and Costello–needles are associated with eyes because the eyes are contained within the needle. So the connection here, between needles and eyes, is a camouflage, a distraction, something we need to look past in order to solve the room.
(Which is in fact what happened. It was WR’s indication that the room clued “needle,” independent of “eye,” that spurred Gentile on to the right solution.)
And that’s not illegitimate, Manson does that all the time, generally speaking. In a sense, most of this book is about camouflaging relationships and meanings. But as I said, doing so here requires making the connection in some instances and not others, in order to get something roughly approximating what seems to be a room solution, and that seems to be a quality of solution that you could fond anywhere.
You can do it in 34 and 14, but it’s problematic to use those as examples, since those both ARE intended to suggest 10.
You can do it in 41, which has no business cluing to 10, but is connected to 10. The doll points to its eyes, the idol (eye-dol!) has one big eye; it stands up straight with its hands in, like an I; at its base are fung-EYE; the mushrooms themselves have a stem and cap that give you a sort of 1-0 structure; the frog has pretty prominent eyes that could be looking at the uprights on the slide, combining for a 1-0; and when its tongue shoots out, that will be another 1! The fly has unusually round eyes and long body unnatural for a housefly, so let’s take that as a 1 and a couple 0s. And the horn next to the doll is nice and tall and straight, differentiated from the twisted and sideways and too-broad horns on the left; so that horn is a one, to go with the all the eyes in the room, and we end up with some 1s and some 0s and the correct door is 10.
Well, why not? Even that ladder by the open doorway to 10 is suggesting of the 1 in a 10.
As David Gentile noted, given multiple eyes, you don’t even need additional hints to get 10: in Roman numerals, I is 1; and the eye-shape is a zero. As long as you’re able to understand the same type of clue in different ways, that can be just as valid a solution. And that works both ways; even “eyes” can become “Is” can become “1s,” so perhaps all those 1s in 41 are viable room solutions there?
Anyway, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but I don’t want to give anyone a pain in the neck about this stuff. My point really isn’t that this was an awful puzzle and we should all hate it. My point is just to explain why–well, I’ll have to continue this another time. I KNOW YOU’LL ALL BE EAGERLY WAITING.
“interpretive deduction”.
No deduction involved in these puzzles, it is ALL induction and inference. It IS about interpretation, but there is a science to doing that correctly. There is not 100% wrong and 100% right here, but there are comparatives where 1 interpretation far exceeds another in merit, and if you wanted to write an article per puzzle you could show that. It’s about what “theories” or “interpretation” or “model” (depending of what field you are working in) is best at accounting for all the data.
I didn’t mean to end the first half of that tirade on such a down note, or with so many typos, but I I was sort of unavoidably interrupted.
Anyway, I’m not trying to sow discontent with Room 34. My point is just that it involves accepting a sort of room-solution slipperiness that, if generally accepted, would lead to bogus solutions all over. The response may be, “Yes, but those rooms have BETTER solutions, and Room 34 DOESN’T. So this is the correct solution in 34.”
And I think that’s true enough, but it provides no rational stopping point either. In general, a good solution, when found, leaves no serious doubt as to its intentionality and correctness. To say that we need to stop searching when there’s nothing better to be found is fairly unprincipled and unconvincing.
David Gentile points out that needles, like eyes, can also constitute 1s and 0s, but he’s right that that doesn’t really help. That’s essentially the same thing I’m taking issue with. It’s like we’re being given a potato, the Argo, a hurricane (more on that below), needles, and then being asked to find the common element–but then to hold off on finding that common element on the things that we can sort of see as being shaped like 1s. That is strikingly less elegant than taking the common element of the lot, or even of ignoring all of the objects except for the one that actually means something (like, for instance, what seems to happen in some rooms where letter-object groupings camouflage the important clues)–we’re just sort of doing whatever we have to to get 10.
And of course the additional problem, above all that, is that if you do take the common element of all objects, and take it to be “eye,” it’s at least as sensible to reason EYE–>AYE–>YES as to reason that eyes might be some sort of circle and some sort of 1. There have been complaints that this solution would be “too easy,” but that doesn’t really address whether it’s the most elegant interpretation of the room. Room 25 seems ridiculously easy, what we know of it, and whatever we’re missing, the incredibly easy signifier is still correct. Room 28 is so simple people refuse to believe it. The devil tails in 26 are simple, but reliable. Room 1 is among the most elegant solutions, but still rather simple. Room 29 has probably the simplest solution in the book, and yet is the most clearly intended. It is not a reasonably defensible puzzle-creation method to create a puzzle that elegantly points to a simple solution in the hopes that the solver will intuit that simplicity is bad and then seek out a less elegant solution; and such an attitude certainly doesn’t prevail in Maze.
Little discussed here is the issue of that “quick-cane” thing, which has long been interpreted to mean “hurry-cane–>hurricane,” another object with an eye. WR hasn’t accepted this solution, so the quick-cane presumably serves another purpose. “Hurry-cane” is a bit stretched for “hurricane,” but not far, and I would be amazed if that pun were unintentional. Assuming it was intentional, it further fuels my discontent for the room solution, because it makes the the distinction between objects-treated-as-eyes-because-they-have-eyes and objects-not-treated-as-eyes even more arbitrary. (E.g. the potato’s eyes are at least pictured, as is the Argo’s, so there’s some leeway to say we’re to consider not the word “eye” but just the shapes of their eyes–although the potato itself makes more of a zero than any of those eyes do.)
(Side note: Look at the pupil of the eye on the Argo: it’s a crescent. I suspect the crescent in the Cleopatra’s Needle picture is meant to relate that picture to the Argo’s eye, not to constitute a 0 in itself. It actually seems like a better circle-line pairing might be:
Monolith–Argo (because of the crescents)
JIBE/PINE/COMPASS–QUICK-cane (both based on written word puzzles)
Potato–stripes on chair (because apparently stripes are 1s, according to the couch and pillow).)
(I haven’t said much about the couch and pillow, but I guess all I have to say about that is that if the rest of the solution is needles and eyes, then the couch seems ok to me, not as an independent, solvable puzzle, but just as a supportive design element.)
Finally, concluding that that monolith on the right is Cleopatra’s Needle is a bit uncomfortably obscure, though, honestly, the puzzle would probably be easier to solve if we didn’t even know that! If you forget it’s a needle, you might just take it to be 1-shaped on its own.
But again, I’m not trying to convince anyone that this is a bad room. I’m just trying to explain why its solution was so shocking. Whatever problems the solution has are suggested by the fact that when so many of us heard the solution we didn’t buy it, that when White Raven endorsed it we questioned his sanity, and that when we learned that Manson had acknowledged the solution we still tried to think of ways it could be not quite true.
That last bit should sound familiar, because it’s what everyone did with Room 45. You hear the solution; you don’t quite buy it. You hear it was the official solution, endorsed by the publishers, you figure something was off. Then read the email on the Bailey site where it’s related that Manson confirmed the solution–well, so what? You just don’t want it to be correct.
White Raven’s right when he says this is the kind of blindness we need to get past. We need to stop trying to isolate the puzzles we don’t like and think, “Well, at least that’s over.” If we’re going to do this, it’s going to come up again and again. For my money, I think it already has: I think the view of ones and zero from 34 has helped to lend a more elegant solution to Room 37.
To be clear, the problem we have is not so much with this “sort” of puzzle. I’d be surprised if the combination of complaints that arose here occurred anywhere else. Again, it’s not just suggesting shapes that are like numbers–if this room had been cluing needles and donuts, I don’t think any of us would be complaining. It’s the unsatisfactory utilization of the relationship between needles and eyes, combined with a lot of minor solutions that seemed downright silly, that SHOOK THE MAZE COMMUNITY TO ITS CORE.
(That’s not something that should be underestimated, though, that string of questionable 1s and 0s that followed on 34. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the one Manson confirmed is the one noted on the podcast as being plausible if the solution were needles and eyes. I’M NOT GOING TO STICK MY NECK OUT AGAIN to dismiss a solution, but the crescent moon as a zero, and the mast as a one, well, I hope you can appreciate how that made the whole shebang look like a crapshoot.)
I am easily the worst offender when it comes to dismissing suggested solutions as implausible, so I think I have to take this lesson to heart more than anybody. It’s pretty tough, though! Like in Room 33, that symmetrical image solution–I think it’s ridiculous! AAaaaaarrghGAAAAAARARR I hate it!
But maybe it’s right, who knows.
Anyway, unless it violates some kind of ethics or understanding, I think it would be helpful for us to know when a solution comes Manson-approved. It might save us a lot of anguish.
(All of us except Greg. Nothing bothers Greg.)
Good to know Greg is not seriously bothered. Obviously WR is not. I’m not. Other’s milage clearly varies.
The monument and the moon could be a 10. Or not. Maybe they just look enough like a 10 to make you stop looking, because I would have put a full moon for 10, I think. In fact, Monument and Moon together give us “M” and with the “I”s here we spell “I’m”. You can get “I’m leaving” with the man. And this is just enough to label it “my door”. This then connects with the Raven poem in 35 where the poem gives “take thy form from off my door”.
don’t follow the man who dropped the cane’s quick choice, be a couch potato and stare at 10.
I imagine he has 10 fingers, lol, and there are fingers below the “Yes” so “Yes,10″.
Are his arm and implied hat a 10?
How about: while the cane seems to be indicating where the man walked if you follow the line it makes it passes through “maybe”. If the man dropped the cane and we put it together with the line of his hand then:”maybe…yes, 10″
For the “NO” just cover part with a thumb. The monument moon thing, I am skeptical of myself. I think there might be more there, like an “M” spelling “I’m” for some unknown reason.
For the pillow, use the other dark square. Then on the couch take not the srtipe that hits the pillow but the next one left, for the length of the pillow. At the top of that line, the light reflection sort of ends it. If you highlight both of those things with a marker, it is a nice 10.
David Gentile,
Congratulations! The pillow is a zero-ish the stripes one-ish.
Congratulations #2! The monument pairs with the moon to make a 10.
White Raven
David Gentile,
You are correct about the hand but there is more to it than that.
Great job all around!
White Raven
I’m very skeptical about these. They’re a little arbitrary. Next you could say the Q in QUICK is comprised of a O and I . Or there is a I and O in “JIBE PINE COMPASS”
25 sign hanging down points to the open “Maybe” door??
For the pillow put it with a stripe near it to get 10.
Jibe and Pine also have “I” sound.
The monument and the circle of the moon could be a 10 too.
“No” is a 10 ,if we cut off part of it.
Follow the line of the man’s hand and it goes through yes, and then 10.
Does the pillow look like an eye/zero? You could pair it with monument do get 10.
Should we name more “I” things. There is imaginay “I” suggested by th Magpie comment. “Magpie” has an I. “I” is in the text twice. The “Trireme” has an “I” sound. “Stripped” has the I sound. “Yes” is “Aye”.Quick has an I.
In 42 if I avoided the pear/pear, I’d take door 30, but that is wrong. Door 4 is right, with the pair of shakers.
It’s a shaker and a grinder.
It’s a pair of granular condiment dispensers.
To help with the discomfort here. I = Aye = Yes is indeed a reasonable line of thought. It’s TOO reasonable. Easy = False in Maze. And a door labeled “Yes” is way to easy.
Well, that’s not totally true, though. Think of the odd-one-in solution in 26, with the devils pointing at the wrong doors–that’s as easy as they come, and it’s correct. The Room 42 solution, involving one door not having a pair/pear on it, is fairly simple, but correct.
The quick-cane is much more difficult to interpret, and Cleopatra’s Needle is relatively obscure…
The bigger lesson here, maybe, is that when a load of objects are returning the same clue, that clue is not alone the solution to the puzzle. Like, here, you have the potato, and the Argo (which has a big eye on it), the “hurricane” (if that’s what it is; WR has not yet expressed respect for that interpretation) as an object with an eye, and two references to needles (being objects with eyes as well). But if the riddle of the room just required figuring out “I,” then the harder-to-interpret aspects of that puzzle are unnecessary. Throw out the hurricane and what does the room say? “Eye.” Throw our Cleopatra’s Needle while you’re at it. What does it say? “Eye.” So what are we gaining here?
If the proposed solution is correct, the eyes become a distraction, causing us to see needles as clues to eyes, even when they are needles that don’t have eyes: a compass needle, a pine needle, an obelisk…
In the same way that the abundance of B words doesn’t draw our attention to the correct B things in 2, but distracts us from them. (I know what your thought is, David, but that’s not an arrowhead on the tip of a spear. It’s a spearhead.)
WR has mentioned some other rooms as having letter-object groupings that we haven’t really seen that way; in those cases, there doesn’t seem to be the same overwhelming examples of the clued thing. I think what we’re looking for here are instances where something is so overclued that most of the clues become extraneous, and Manson doesn’t generally traffic in extraneous hints; we should be on guard that more is at play.
(TL, DR: I mean it’s because there’s a lot of it not because it’s easy.)
In 26 you are thinking a step ahead already. The easiest thing to do is to simply follow where the devil points. That’s wrong. So is the other devil, and so is the guy holding up 1 finger. But it is only by knowing that easy clues are wrong, that you can get to the fact that room 30 is right. “Odd one in” is also “find all the easy false clues and scratch them”.
I missed the “hurricane” what is that?
There is one trick to the “I” things here in my mind. It is to stop BEFORE you group “i” with ‘Eye”. So you get 1 0. That’s tricky. And then yes to use the 2 seperate needles by themselves without making more “I”s of them. It is unusual, but fair, I think. I’ll go with the last comment always be on guard, lol.
So, tying it together, the couch potato is right, and the “quick” is wrond. Goes with Tortoise thing.
Although, the problem is, with the text talking about sitting on the floor, it does seem like we should be taking into account the cane on the floor, no? And the “quick” is just there as a pun, unless you read the text’s description of their lounging and laziness as running counter to the “quick” message of the cane, suggesting that we should ignore it for that reason (or, rather, take it as an indication that that is the wrong door).
Which requires ignoring the fact that the cane is sitting on the floor, as clued by the text! BAH!
The quick choice is the wrong one, so don’t follow the point of the cane.
Why is it a “chair potato” and not a “couch potato”? At ease and comfortable also imply the couch potato. He’d have a nice view of 10.