Physicists have created the most fiendishly difficult maze

Maze Design and Exit Structure

• The maze used in the article has an interior start and no clearly designated exit.
• This creates many “false exits” and removes the sense of progressing toward an outer goal.
• Some suggest you can turn such a maze into a single-exit maze by surrounding it with a thin “moat” and one opening, adding relatively little area. Others note this doesn’t change the solving problem once you’re in the moat.
• Observers remark that only part of the shown maze is reachable from the start; half of the outer cycle is unreachable, which arguably reduces real complexity.

What Makes a Maze Difficult?

• There is skepticism that the journalistic claim of “most fiendishly difficult” is meaningful.
• Proposed complexity metrics include: branching factor and depth (b^d search space), number of forks and wrong paths, and more geometric measures of cumulative turning.
• Several commenters stress that human difficulty differs from algorithmic complexity: jagged shapes and visual clutter can make mazes feel much harder without changing the underlying graph.
• Visibility and exploration model matter: full bird’s‑eye view vs gradual discovery, vision range, and whether backtracking has a cost.

Human vs Algorithmic Solving

• Classical algorithms like DFS and the “keep a hand on the wall” rule are mentioned, but latter fails for mazes with disconnected walls.
• Humans can’t practically do BFS; behavior is closer to beam search with large switching costs.
• People report “intuitive” maze solving: defocusing and having the correct path “pop out,” or using heuristics that are hard to formalize.
• Micromouse competitions are cited as a rich space of practical maze‑solving algorithms.

Maze Aesthetics, Generation, and Clutter

• Hand‑drawn “brain mazes” and noodly/fractal designs are compared with generated mazes; some claim handmade mazes can be much harder.
• One example shows that adding internal wall fragments to each cell significantly increases visual difficulty while preserving the underlying topology.
• Some see the article’s maze as essentially a triangular tiling artifact; others look for the underlying code (e.g., de Bruijn grid–based rhombic tilings).

Myth, Metaphor, and Terminology

• The Minotaur’s labyrinth is used as a metaphor for computational hardness and cryptography.
• There is extended debate on “maze” vs “labyrinth,” branching vs unicursal paths, and how various languages and historical sources treat the terms, with no final consensus.