Anyone tried the Maze

Discuss interdimensional programming, Java applets and so forth.

Anyone tried the Maze

Postby Marek14 » Thu Jul 21, 2005 1:03 pm

I found this link on the main page:

http://www.urticator.net/maze/

I downloaded the maze and tried to navigate it in 4D - it's really not that much difficult. I would be interested in your experiences.
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Re: Anyone tried the Maze

Postby quickfur » Wed Aug 03, 2005 3:50 am

Marek14 wrote:I found this link on the main page:

http://www.urticator.net/maze/

I downloaded the maze and tried to navigate it in 4D - it's really not that much difficult. I would be interested in your experiences.

I've tried this maze game. I like it a lot, and actually made some enhancements to it to allow more textures (such as octahedra which are more noticeable). It's helped me a lot to get a feel for movement in 4-space; this and the 4D Rubik's cube program are what gave me a solid understanding of rotations in 4D. (And indirectly, this has led me to re-discover the duoprisms and the duocylinder independently.)

As to its difficulty, it depends on how you gauge difficulty. :-) I usually use the multiple-3D-floors technique to navigate the maze, and it works well for small mazes. However, once it gets past 4x4x4x4, things get a little hairy. I'm still not confident enough with keeping track of my position in 4-space, even though I've developed a good feel for the various rotations that still keep you upright. I find that while I can keep track of the branches in a corridor (e.g. how many branches are joined to the starting position, the way they fork, where dead-ends are, etc.), I have a hard time keeping track of their exact shape. I can remember that a particular corridor has 5 turns, for example, and I can navigate through it quite easily, but I lose track of my orientation after I'm done and can't quite figure out which way I'm facing relative to the structure of the maze.
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Postby moonlord » Fri Feb 10, 2006 5:42 pm

How can I play the game? I mean, after I unpack the .tgz, Java doesn't seem to be able to open anything. I've been trying for a while...
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Postby quickfur » Mon Feb 13, 2006 4:18 pm

moonlord wrote:How can I play the game? I mean, after I unpack the .tgz, Java doesn't seem to be able to open anything. I've been trying for a while...

cd out
java Maze
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Postby moonlord » Mon Feb 13, 2006 6:18 pm

Ummm, and if I'm using Windoze? :?
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Postby quickfur » Mon Feb 13, 2006 6:38 pm

moonlord wrote:Ummm, and if I'm using Windoze? :?

Hmm. I'm not sure... I assume you could just open up the command prompt (Start -> Run -> "cmd"), and cd into wherever you unpacked the tgz, go into the subdirectory (um... folder) called "out", and run "java Maze".

Or you could use Explorer to go into the "out" folder in the unpacked game, and run Java on the "Maze" class file. Possibly just double click on it? (Just a wild guess... I don't actually have Windows at home so I'm assuming that's the way Java would work.)
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Postby papernuke » Mon Aug 07, 2006 12:01 am

It won't work for me i need to buy the thing that starts it :cry:
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Re: Anyone tried the Maze

Postby Secret » Mon Apr 04, 2011 12:47 pm

Very sorry for reviving this ages old thread but it'll be better to post it here rather to make a new (duplicate) thread of it (as it is related to utricator's 4d maze)

This thing had been bogging me for 3 years
3 years ago when I first discovered this, I downloaded it and run according to the instructions, FAIL

I was frustrated so I forget about it and look for other 4D apps

3 years later, I rediscover the technique to navigate 4D space (still not including the 4D depth perception, though), therefore I want to try the 4D maze out again to check my mastery in 4D navigation. I downloaded it again and run, and I STILL GOT THIS!

Image
(blued out region is mydocuments (name blurred for security reasons))

Tried to look for solution on the internet confused me completely, as I suck at computers more than maths.
How to fix it?
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Re: Anyone tried the Maze

Postby Keiji » Mon Apr 04, 2011 1:35 pm

...Well, I just downloaded it from http://www.urticator.net/maze/download.html and double-clicked the jar and it works.
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Re: Anyone tried the Maze

Postby Secret » Mon Apr 04, 2011 3:24 pm

i also tried that, still the classdefnotfound error

I hope someone can help me to solve this, cause this game has a good representation of 4D besides 4D tris (knew from youtube clips, but it'll be better if you can actually walk in this thing)
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Re: Anyone tried the Maze

Postby Mrrl » Mon Dec 07, 2015 3:22 pm

Finally I found some time to play this game. When I was solving puzzle "redcube4c" (to build tesseract from 16-cell and 8 simplexes) I understood that my brain doesn't want this "3D retina" visualization at all: it doesn't understand where are faces of these wireframe models, and how to find face that has shape of the regular tetrahedron. It prefers interpretation of 4D as "2D + two depth directions", but in Blocks game these directions are not equivalent...
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Re: Anyone tried the Maze

Postby quickfur » Thu Jan 14, 2016 12:20 am

Yeah I think any projection-based 4D visualization method must, at the very least, be based on polygon-rendering rather than wireframe renderings. However, polygon renderings are more tricky to program, and one runs into performance issues, such as the large number of polygons that need to be drawn, how to clip 4D and 3D volumes in real-time, as well as clarity issues (generally, after about 3-4 layers of filled polygons, the visual field is saturated and any deeper polygons will likely be either invisible, or clutter up the image and make it incomprehensible).

Of course, even after those obstacles are overcome, there's still the problem of features of the projections that are 4D-specific, with no direct 3D analogue, so our brain has a hard time interpreting them. One prominent example of this is when you're looking down a corrider that has a T-junction opening into a perpendicular corridor. In the analogous 3D situation, you'd see 3 elements of the opening: part of the side corridor's ceiling, floor, and far wall. Because of this, our brain has come to expect exactly one of each element when recognizing a side corridor. However, in 4D, there are not 3, but 5 visible elements: the first 3 have 3D analogues: part of the side corridor's ceiling, floor, and the far wall. But parts of two of the side walls are also visible! This is something with no direct analogue in 3D, and it looks very confusing to our 3D-centric brain. What happens next is that our brain says "square tube surrounded by 2 side elements, a ceiling, and a floor -- that's not a corridor, that's a tube floating in space". So it fails to recognize the "square tube" as the far wall of a side corridor.

Even after you have trained yourself to interpret this combination of elements differently, the instinct of "X surrounded by sides, top, bottom elements == protruding object" is so strong, that you'd probably just lapse into thinking about it abstractly, rather than truly visualizing the side-corridor for what it is. The most common misinterpretation at this point is to equate the square tube (i.e., the far wall of the side corridor) with the corridor itself, rather than a wall that's part of the real corridor. So far, I have not been able to truly surmount this difficulty mentally, without using abstract analogies as workarounds.
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