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A Colorful Journey through Endless Patterns of Quick Wits |
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Robert Abbott |
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Robert Abbott is the World's
leading creator and expert in mazes of all kinds. An
incredible variety of his ideas can easily entangle
your imagination and amuse your mind: Theseus and the
Minotaur, Alice Mazes, Sliding Door Maze, Mazes with
Things That Roll, The Bureaucratic Maze, and Dungeon
Mazes, just to name a few.
His website,
www.logicmazes.com, contains some
interactive versions of these and many other mazes. One of them, the
Starry Night Maze, is on the
GAMES® website. |
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Abbott's Babel card game.
The illustration by Alexandr Badmayev to the game card (1977) from
Serhiy Grabarchuk's private game collection.
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Abbott's Games |
Before becoming involved with
mazes, Abbott invented many card and board games which
now are true classics of that genre. Among those there
were Eleusis, Babel, Leopard, Auction, Variety,
Metamorphosis, Switch, Construction, Ultima,
Epaminondas, Confusion, and others.
In 1963, his card & board games were published in the
book, Abbott’s New Card Games.1
Eleusis, invented in 1956, was the most successful of
these games. In 1959, Eleusis appeared in Martin
Gardner's legendary Mathematical Games column of
Scientific American.
You can read the details about Abbott's games
here. |
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Robert Abbott playing his unpublished game Confusion.
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Robert Abbott's maze, Traffic Flow In Floyd's Knob, appeared in
Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column.
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The Farmer Goes to
Market |
In 1962, in Martin Gardner's
Scientific American column, the first ever multi-state
maze (or maze-with-rules) appeared under the name,
Traffic Flow In Floyd's Knob; see its diagram on the
left. It was created by Robert Abbott, and in 1997
appeared in his book, SuperMazes.2
The challenge is to get from Start (at the left edge
of the town's plan) to Finish (at the right edge),
passing through the town along the roads, and only
choosing directions allowed by arrows on the town's
plan. No U-turns or backing-up are allowed.
In 1990 a harder version of this maze under the name,
The Farmer Goes to Market, was published in Robert
Abbott's book, Mad Mazes.3 Its
diagram is shown just below. Give both versions a try
to see whether you are a clever driver. |
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Robert Abbott's maze, Farmer Goes
to Market, as it appeared in his Mad Mazes book.
Copyright © Robert Abbott
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Theseus and the Minotaur interactive maze by Robert Abbott. |
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Theseus and the
Minotaur |
It is quite a unique puzzle maze
created by Robert Abbott, and published in his book
Mad Mazes in 1990; its diagram is shown just below.
The object is to get Theseus out of the maze, at the
same time keeping away from the Minotaur. The ingenious
idea behind the puzzle is that while Theseus makes one
step, the Minotaur can perform two steps. But the
Minotaur is not as clever as Theseus, and he just simply
tries to get closer to Theseus, always preferring
horizontal moves to vertical moves.
You can try ten challenges of the interactive version of
Theseus and the Minotaur
here, and certainly you will like this unusual
puzzle. At that page you can also learn more about the
history of the Theseus and the Minotaur puzzle which for
almost twenty years evolved into a fantastic set of 87
quite challenging puzzles, and now is also available in
the beautifully made version for the
iPhone and iPod Touch. |
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Robert Abbott's maze, Theseus and
the Minotaur, as it appeared in his Mad Mazes book.
Copyright © Robert Abbott
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Robert Abbott's 3D Maze.
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Floor plans of 3D Maze.
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3D Maze sample in a transparent box.
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Parts of 3D Maze sample.
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Abbott's 3D Maze |
This maze is especially
interesting and memorable for me as it was the first
time I have ever solved Abbott's mazes. That "tiny," 4 x
4 x 4 maze gave me a lot of emotions and is one of my
brightest memories from my puzzle beginnings.
It was almost four decades ago when I as a young boy
read about it in Martin Gardner's Sixth Book of
Mathematical Games from Scientific American,4
and was so fascinated with the maze that I made it out
of a transparent box and plastic pieces glued
according to the drawings in the book.
I still remember the moment when I found the tricky
way for a ball to jump over from one level to another;
this was a small miracle which led me to the solution!
This maze was one of my first puzzles, and it is a
rare sample in my collection and one of my favorite
puzzles. Generally, now I could add that it is one of
the best puzzles ever created.
I crafted my sample of Abbott's 3D Maze after the
description in Martin Gardner's book, but with one
tiny change—I added a unit wall in the level D to
eliminate one of two equally-possible shortest paths
of the route through the maze and leave just the
other, not-so-obvious one. With this I got just a
single shortest path from the entrance to the exit.
That additional unit wall is indicated on the back
left face of the transparent box in the pictures on
the left.
Also, my sample has its whole structure turned for 90
degrees so that its entrance is at the top face of the
box (on its "roof"), and its exit is at its bottom
left corner in the ground floor.
A more complex, 4 x 4 x 5 version of this cubic maze
Robert Abbott published in his book, Mad Mazes,
under the name, The Itsy Bitsy Spider. It involves a
spider.
Here, I would like to point out that moving a real
ball through this maze is quite tricky, since you need
to manipulate the whole maze so that the ball moves
along a specific trajectory and enters a unit cell
exactly between two walls. That cell is indicated with
an asterisk on the front right face of the transparent
box. So Abbott's 3D Maze may be also considered as a
highly sophisticated dexterity puzzle.
Last but not least, if you craft your own sample of
Abbott's 3D Maze, you definitely will be rewarded with
a lot of fun—first by solving the maze yourself, and
then by challenging your relatives and friends with
it. |
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Last
Updated: July 8, 2009
Posted: July 8, 2009 |
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