When I first heard of Minecraft in 2011, I wasn't very interested. I was busy, and thought if I got sucked in it would consume a lot of my time. (Spoiler: I was right, it eventually did exactly that.)
Because of this, the very first thing about Minecraft that truly caught my attention was its potential as a front-end interface for exploring a 3D "Borg-cube" maze. As such, helping to build Maze World on Caffeinecraft represents my very first direct experience with Minecraft. When Drew & I created Proto Maze & Mammoth Maze around June 2012, I still did not even own a Minecraft account and had never played it before.
We had never seen anything like this, so in a sense we were discovering and studying it for the first time. I sent an email to Drew on June 12, 2012, in which I marveled at the sheer statistical brutality of this maze format. "[At 49x49x49,] the pre-expanded maze data has nearly 120,000 spaces in it. For an average maze of this size, the directions to the goal ... include around a thousand steps, most of which have wrong turns I could make. Dead ends and catacombs occupy around 95% of the maze. ... The sheer volume of time I'm likely to spend in the wrong 95% of it could be months, at least."
I knew I'd hit on something really unusual when it seemed to impress Matt. He spent a fair amount of time in Mammoth Maze, and once with a hint of astonishment he called it a "hamster-tube nightmare." That's the closest he generally comes to giving a compliment, so that's how I took it. 😉
When I first heard of Minecraft in 2011, I wasn't very interested. I was busy, and thought if I got sucked in it would consume a lot of my time. (Spoiler: I was right, it eventually did exactly that.)
Because of this, the very first thing about Minecraft that truly caught my attention was its potential as a front-end interface for exploring a 3D "Borg-cube" maze. As such, helping to build Maze World on Caffeinecraft represents my very first direct experience with Minecraft. When Drew & I created Proto Maze & Mammoth Maze around June 2012, I still did not even own a Minecraft account and had never played it before.
We had never seen anything like this, so in a sense we were discovering and studying it for the first time. I sent an email to Drew on June 12, 2012, in which I marveled at the sheer statistical brutality of this maze format. "[At 49x49x49,] the pre-expanded maze data has nearly 120,000 spaces in it. For an average maze of this size, the directions to the goal ... include around a thousand steps, most of which have wrong turns I could make. Dead ends and catacombs occupy around 95% of the maze. ... The sheer volume of time I'm likely to spend in the wrong 95% of it could be months, at least."
I knew I'd hit on something really unusual when it seemed to impress Matt. He spent a fair amount of time in Mammoth Maze, and once with a hint of astonishment he called it a "hamster-tube nightmare." That's the closest he generally comes to giving a compliment, so that's how I took it. 😉
--Phos_Quartz