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When I was a kid I was really good at mazes. I would just stare at the maze, kinda zone out for a minute unfocusing on the entire thing, and eventually one pat
by UI_at_80x24 2y ago
When I was a kid I was really good at mazes. I would just stare at the maze, kinda zone out for a minute unfocusing on the entire thing, and eventually one path would look brighter to me somehow. I could never solve a maze by tracing my finger along a route, but if I 'un-focused' it would jump out of the page at me.
My mother has told me I would have them done within seconds, and I'd have a whole book before she'd finish putting the groceries away.
I've never thought much about it other then, 'I used to like doing mazes'; but I wonder if it was a special gift I could have developed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 2y agoSlightly silly question—did you actually check the validity of your solutions? It would be extremely funny, and certainly the type of thing I would have done as a kid, to just assume the path I’d found was the right one, haha.
- UI_at_80x24 2y agoNope I checked. I was wrong a couple of times but it was rare.
- bee_rider 2y agoMaybe in an alternate life you are a real wizard at designing PCBs.
- ordu 2y ago> I wonder if it was a special gift I could have developed. Seems that you managed to train your neural networks to do a parallel search. Probably visual cortex neurons. GPU acceleration rocks.
- qup 2y agoI had a middle school friend who was a great artist, but also he drew mazes. "Brain mazes" he called them, because of the noodly look. Anyway, I always wondered how he could do it. To me he was just drawing lines everywhere, but there would eventually be a complete maze with only one solution. Maybe it was a memorized algo--like a party trick basically.
- Jach 2y agoThat's a fun name. I used to draw sort of noodly-ish mazes as a kid, too, though they didn't always have a unique path as there could be branch loops. Did they look at all like this 7 minute mouse drawing version? https://imgur.com/a/lat8S6N https://imgur.com/a/lat8S6N There's no fancy process to it, though. I can picture a much more impressive maze deserving of the "brain maze" name.
- Dunati 2y agoI used to doodle mazes very much like this in middle and high school, and the images in this story immediately reminded me of them
- Dunati 2y agoI have this one I made in high school, with a little RPG style game to go with it: https://imgur.com/a/3XpM11z https://imgur.com/a/3XpM11z These weren't hard to make as you just built out from the start and added random branches, or dead ended them occasionally.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ssl-3 2y agoSame. I'd just relax and de-focus for a moment, keeping my eyes on a printed maze but not really looking at it. To me, the path never really looked any different visually -- it was just clearly and distinctly evident in ways that I cannot properly articulate. Once the path revealed itself through no particular effort on my part, I could trace it out with a pencil or a crayon or whatever. I could do this trace by starting from random points in the middle, drawing lines towards the outside, or start at one end or the other. It didn't really make a difference to me where I started the trace. To me, I was just tracing parts of a path that I knew to be correct -- it didn't matter at all to me what order I drew them in. It was a rather unpopular trick. Other kids were sure that I was cheating (as if I had a catalog of solutions to all of the world's mazes in my head or something) or showing off (they may have been right about this last part). Adults would proclaim (rather insistently) I must be doing it wrong somehow despite consistently and confidently, if unconventionally, arriving at the correct answer on the first try. They tended to make it very clear that they were unappreciative of this departure from normalcy.