Mouse Maze
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Mouse Maze is a flash game created by the CuriousGaming, a user on Kongregate. You can play Mouse Maze here.
It's a very simple game which has some surprisingly complex behaviour. Tom's description of the rules is pretty much perfect, so I'll just repeat it verbatim here: Draw a maze. Release the mouse. Confound it for as long as you can. Squeaky follows a primitive algoritm; he always chooses the square he has visited least. Squeaky prefers down and right. Squeaky doesn’t like ups and lefts |
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That's it. Very simple. But if you go look at some of the higher scoring mazes (some people are more generous than us, and upload their good mazes for other people to play), or play around with it a bit, you'll see that it's not at all easy to predict with the naked eye what Squeaky is going to do on any particular maze.
Several years ago, this piqued the interest of a group of mathematicians at Queen Mary University of London, and they started writing genetic algorithms to produce harder and harder mazes for Squeaky to escape from, and thinking about just how hard those mazes could get.
Earlier this year, Jess and I got interested in the problem again, we made a little bit of progress, and submitted a paper to Fun With Algorithms 2016. It was accepted, and we went to Italy in June to present our work. You can see the final version of the paper here. We had great fun, and Mouse Maze is by no means solved, we're still thinking about how to get higher scores, and what the highest possible score might be.
Several years ago, this piqued the interest of a group of mathematicians at Queen Mary University of London, and they started writing genetic algorithms to produce harder and harder mazes for Squeaky to escape from, and thinking about just how hard those mazes could get.
Earlier this year, Jess and I got interested in the problem again, we made a little bit of progress, and submitted a paper to Fun With Algorithms 2016. It was accepted, and we went to Italy in June to present our work. You can see the final version of the paper here. We had great fun, and Mouse Maze is by no means solved, we're still thinking about how to get higher scores, and what the highest possible score might be.