Now We're Getting Lost

Remember those plastic rulers slash mazes in grade school?  

This I would love to see in real life.

The ones with tiny ball bearings inside you have to maneuver through a kind of dinky, half-hearted maze the entire length of the ruler.  It was so easy that even an infant can get that tiny ball from point A to B just by shaking the ruler, and you just have to wonder why the manufacturers bothered at all.  I mean if you're going to make a maze, might as well make it grand.  Make sure that ball gets lost, because then what is the point?  

Well it turns out a ruler is the wrong medium for a maze.  It's so 2D.

Let's have a ball.

A sphere is much better, such as Michael McGinnis' maze inside a ball called Perplexus (and a much trickier one, Superperplexus)

Two days ago I got hold of a Perplexus ball at the Hobbes and Landes at Shangri-La.  No, I didn't buy it, just toyed with it because it's right there on the shelf, and boy was it hard.  Think M.C. Escher's famous mind-boggling stairs because that's what it felt like.

I had to put it back down after a couple of vain attempts to navigate the ball because I didn't want the store clerk suddenly springing a "Time's Up" on me.  

Anyway, high price and rather thin plastic used for the ball aside, it's an ingenious game.  And to think McGinnis hatched the idea for his 3D labyrinth back in the 1970s, but only got to pitch it two decades later because probably the technology wasn't there yet.  

The whole time I was tilting the ball in my hands, I was thinking about the laborious process of designing the pathways just to have that ball bearing inside a grand time.

Now, we're getting lost.