Rooms of the House

First Pages:

Cover1 Title1 Directions1 Prologue1

 

Rooms of MAZE in sequence:

Scan0001 Scan0002 Scan0003 Scan0004 Scan0005 Scan0006 Scan0007 Scan0008 Scan0009 Scan0010 Scan0011 Scan0012 Scan0013 Scan0014 Scan0015 Scan0016 Scan0017 Scan0018 Scan0019 Scan0020 Scan0021 Scan0022 Scan0023 Scan0024 Scan0025 Scan0026 Scan0027 Scan0028 Scan0029 Scan0030 Scan0031 Scan0032 Scan0033 Scan0034 Scan0035 Scan0036 Scan0037 Scan0038 Scan0039 Scan0040 Scan0041 Scan0042 Scan0043 Scan0044 Scan0045

 

The House is generally arranged in three levels: upper (the Path), middle (the Loop), and lower (the Trap).

The Path: The upper level contains nineteen rooms, the rooms of the 16 room path (one is visited twice) and four side rooms off of the Path. The only way to enter the Path is from room 1. Most doors on the Path exit to the Loop or the Trap.

Navigate by clicking on numbers.

Image Map

The Loop: The middle (ground) level contains nineteen rooms that meander about eventually leading back to room 1. The loop can be entered from two of the four doors in room 1, or from many doors along the Path. There are only six ways to exit the loop: five lead to the Trap and one leads back to room 1.

Navigate by clicking on numbers.

Image Map

The Trap: The lower level contains seven trap rooms. The trap rooms can be entered from many doors along the Path or five doors from the Loop. There are no exits from the Trap and room 24 (the trap within the Trap) has no exit doors and ends the journey.

Navigate by clicking on numbers.

Image Map  

- Images Copyright 1985 by Christopher Manson.

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53 thoughts on “Rooms of the House

  1. So what would likely be the most ideal time to post, if you were searching for the XIII hour? 1 a.m. (I A M) perhaps?

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    • 1 AM is not the 13th hour. It’s the end of the first hour. 1 PM is the 13th hour of the day. 1300 hours in “military time.”

      It doesn’t say “1 AM,” however. It says “IAM,” because that’s “William” minus the “Will,” which is part of the solution to a puzzle that has been repeatedly confirmed by official sources. This is one of very few things in the book that does not remain mysterious.

      Interpreting it as “1 AM,” as a way to get to “13 o’clock,” even if that were a reasonable step, has no apparent purpose.

      You are aware of all this.

      LIKE(3)
    • It’s 2020. Maze has existed for nearly 35 years.

      THIS is the conversation we’re having. That “IAM” is “1 AM.”
      In a way, it’s comforting, because as much as the world is changing, the kind of stuff here will never change.

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    • In belated fairness to WBM, reading “I A M” as “1 A.M.” is perfectly plausible on its own. It was suggesting that through multiple layers of obfuscation that was irksome; the suggestion being unhelpful and unnecessary was just the cherry on top. But it’s perfectly reasonable to toss out ideas like, “You could read ‘IAM’ as ’1 A.M.’ Does that suggest anything to anyone?”

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  2. MAZE (1985) by Christopher Manson is a magnificent and utterly beautiful book. It stands out as unique in many ways. It aspires to achieve the rare world-class integration and harmony of text and illustrations as in Winnie The Pooh, and triumphantly succeeds. The quality and imaginative range of the puzzles is wondrous. Manson was so far ahead of his time, preceding Computer Games and indeed Escape Rooms.

    THREE MEN IN A MAZE (1977) by Stephen Leslie is another book with the same idea of treating the pages as rooms within a maze. It precedes MAZE, but is a much simpler book, with jolly illustrations but no hidden puzzles or paradoxes. There may even have been earlier books with the same idea, but I have not come across any.

    I have created hundreds of full size landscape mazes and puzzles across 40 countries since 1975. My book THE AMAZING BOOK OF MAZES (2006) contains a folding pages maze with 26 rooms, connected in the logic of a one-way maze. Fabricated to a human scale, it would be ideal to entertain astronauts on the International Space Station, since the vast hinged sails of the maze need to be turned backwards and forwards in order to solve the maze by floating weightlessly through each one-way portal. It features an underlying network structure which is intended to thwart those who try and cheat by working it out backwards. Not many people have realised this. It’s like a game of chess where the designer must play all his moves in advance and there has to be a demonstrable solution, so in the end the designer must allow the player to win.

    I warmly and wholeheartedly salute this wonderful and beautiful book and its creator Christopher Manson.

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  3. Although I did not hear back from you yet, I decided to make it anyway just for fun.
    Would you like to put it up on this site?

    LIKE(2)
    • Nick,

      Yes, by all means! I’m looking forward to seeing it!

      LIKE(1)
    • Hey Nick, urls do not post in here. (WR needed to do this to reduce spam.) Either add in some spaces so the url isn’t recognized as such or email the url to WR so he can post it. :)

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    • Nick H,

      I found the link in my spam folder. I am WiFi-less right now, but I will download in it a few days.

      In the meantime could you answer a few questions?

      > What language/engine did you create it in?

      > Is it web-ready?

      > Do you have it online somewhere so we can see how it works?

      Thanks!

      White Raven

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    • 1) It’s just HTML files. I wrote them in WordPad :P

      2) Yes. As previously stated, each room has one .html file.

      What I do not currently have, however, is a way for you to type in the room number and be redirected to that file.

      3) No, but I might be able to.

      LIKE(0)
    • Nick H.,

      I misunderstood, I assumed by “calculator” you meant a program probably written in java, which did calculations of some kind. I believe that the maps I have added to each page make the need for a list of room choices redundant. The maps have the most efficient path marked.

      Since you are a real MAZE fan and obviously put a lot of work into this project I would suggest starting your own blog. It is easy and usually free. Then you can just type in your lists and anything else you would like to share about MAZE.

      LIKE(2)
    • Yeah, that’s originally what I was going to do, but as you pointed out, that wasn’t really going to work, and I decided to hard-code it all. What do you recommend for creating my blog?

      LIKE(0)
    • I have a Maze blog that has barely been used. Send me an email if you want it.

      Vewatkin at gmail dot com

      LIKE(2)
    • I made a Maze tool for a similar purpose yesterday. I can’t post the URL here, but if you look at my latest post on MazeCast (“Announcing Maze Birdfinder”) you’ll see it.

      It’s not doing the same thing as your idea, but I hope this helps anyway.

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    • Nick H.,

      I’d take Vewatkin up on his offer.

      But if you want to go your own way WordPress provides free blogs and you can embed html in the posts via a zip file.

      https://wordpress.com/create/

      If you decide to make your own site just be sure you do not post images from the book (I have a contract with Manson for this site). If you are determined to post images I suggest using the ones which can be found on the archive-obs site which has permission from the publisher. I cannot guarantee Manson will not have a problem with the archive-obs images being reposted but these images are rather small and I am pretty sure he would be fine with it.

      http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/holt/books/maze/

      But again, I’d take Vewatkin’s offer. It’s free and you would be part of a community of MAZE fans.

      LIKE(1)
    • Oh humm…..I already posted it myself. Anyone is welcome to link to the site below though:

      maze dot is dash great dot org slash mazeadvisor

      The reason I didn’t use Vewatkin’s offer is that he said it has “barely been used” but either of you are welcome to provide a link to my site.

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    • It was my grandmother’s blog and she only used it once a week for church.

      LIKE(1)
    • Hmm… I might be interested. Was the blog used on roads that were salted in winter?

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    • Thanks for posting the link. Also, no offense, but there are only a few rooms with birds, what’s the point of a birdfinder? :P

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    • Enthusiasts may have a pretty good idea of how many birds there are, and where they can be located, but casual MAZE fans and the hundreds of thousands of English-speakers who don’t own a copy can still learn a lot from the Birdfinder.

      LIKE(1)
    • Nick H.,

      I have the same reaction whenever I read about the sport of bird watching.

      LIKE(1)
    • Vewatikin,

      Interesting… that is something you should post on the blog. It may drive up the resale value.

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    • Yeah I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s others, but #21 is the only one I could name off the top of my head.

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  4. This book seems like it should be easy to figure out. There are only 45 rooms. Not counting the inaccessible end of one-way doors, there are only about 136 doors. If you count the two ends of a two-way doorway as one door, there are only about 93 doors. Sure, the odds against making the correct choice in a series of rooms grow exponentially the more rooms you have to go through, but if you go through multiple times, you can learn through trial and error, right? It only takes 7 steps to get to Room 45, and there are only a few options at each step. It’s also not that hard to realize that all of the Trap rooms are bad, and even if you don’t memorize their numbers, you can cheat a little and go back a step whenever you go through a door and recognize a Trap room. However, that’s where the things that are easy to figure out end. I’m pretty sure I went through this book a lot more than 136 times as a kid, and while I did figure out that the Trap was bad and that a lot of rooms seemed to just lead me back to Room 1, I never once made it to Room 45. Even after I started cheating by flipping through to look at rooms I hadn’t technically gotten to yet, and checking to see which rooms led to Room 45, and whether there were any rooms that lead to those rooms, I STILL couldn’t figure it out. Truly, both the structure of the Maze and the nature of the puzzles and the other thing(s) you have to figure out makes it very challenging.

    LIKE(3)
    • Novice,

      In my opinion the two most amazing things about MAZE are 1. that Manson had the idea at all of a book through which one could wander and 2. the brilliant structural arrangement of the rooms. Each realm has it’s own purpose and is arranged to maximize clueless wandering. It is absolutely amazing when you consider that MAZE was the first of it’s kind. It is nice to see someone appreciate the deep structure of the path-system.

      LIKE(2)
  5. I was planning to hard-code what to say for each room since there are only 45. Would that work?

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    • Nick H.,

      Sorry for the delay, I was responding to the hint for this month. It is a great idea! My time is limited but I will see if I can find a quick and easy way to implement it.

      Welcome to The Abyss!

      LIKE(0)
    • Nick H,

      I looked into it and as cool as a MAZE-calculator would be I simply do not have time to create such a thing. Have any easier to implement ideas?

      LIKE(0)
  6. Just for (an additional) reference, rooms are as follows.

    Path:
    01 02 04 05 08 12 15 17 20 23 26 28 29 30 32 37 39 42 45

    Loop:
    03 07 09 10 13 14 16 18 19 21 25 27 31 33 34 35 36 41 44

    Trap:
    06 11 22 24 38 40 43

    LIKE(2)
    • AdmiralMercurial, (cool name)

      Welcome to Into The Abyss!

      Thanks for the reference!

      White Raven

      LIKE(1)
    • Hey White Raven, I was thinking of something where you input a room number and it tells you if you are in the path, loop, or trap, and even where to go from there.

      LIKE(1)
  7. I think he’s just copying something and putting my name in it. None of this is describing anyone’s actual behavior on the site, however generously viewed; nobody is requesting “evidence” (whatever that would mean, in the context of Maze) or clamoring for a debate; nobody is cyberbullying anybody; nobody is being goaded into behavior that gets their “account” suspended; etc. WBM seems to be going through something right now, but whatever it is, his repeated copy/paste comments spread around to every page on the site should not be mistaken for real attempts at conversation, or an expression of earnest grievances.

    If there’s something we’ve learned from years of dealing with WBM, it’s that obvious strategies are not useful is getting him to stop posting perpetual nonsense. He doesn’t appreciate you being polite, he doesn’t want to engage in discussion, he doesn’t like being ignored, and he doesn’t like being dismissed. The only way to please him may be to agree with him, which is admittedly a strategy we’ve never tried, but that does not seem likely to curtail his nonsense posting, even if it would decrease his tantrum posting. Just buckle up, everybody! The fun never stops with the fun factory!

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  8. I don’t think he IS copying from something. Nobody except WBM would just write “quest scions” and then move on without any explanation.

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  9. Has anyone considered reaching out to WR about him? His behavior over the last week or two has escalated to just plain spamming, which is almost universally recognized as grounds for being banned from any forum.

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  10. When was the last time WR interacted here at all though? I’m pretty sure it was before I joined. I don’t think they care anymore.

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  11. His self-imposed term of involvement expired in 2016 (although I think he was also experiencing some serious health issues at the time), but he posted at least a couple of times after that. His last post that I’m aware of was on March 1st, 2017, on the now defunct Ask Manson page, where he mentioned he was writing his dissertation. However, he still checks the site every few weeks to approve new members, as he did with me last month.

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  12. I did some googling and found that a surprisingly high amount of WBM’s posts are just copied and pasted from elsewhere. Not just recently, but going way back. Most of these originate from either Wikipedia articles or online dictionary entries (and of course elsewhere on the abyss more recently). For example, the first comment I ever read on this forum was this unprompted explanation of psychopomps that he posted on the Identity of the Guide page in 2018; it was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article of the same name. Likewise, many of his recent comments originate from the Wikipedia article titled “Sealioning”, slightly edited to include vewatkins’ handle.

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  13. Just a quick note to say that the Ask Manson page is still up. It’s accessible from the right-hand menu but not the top menu. :) (Or maybe you meant that it was defunct in the sense that WR is no longer asking Manson questions on our behalf.) I’ve emailed WR once or twice since he took his leave but have not received a response. It would be nice to hear from him! I hope he’s doing ok.

    LIKE(1)

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