Daedalus on Numb3rs

A Maze created by Daedalus 2.1 was featured on the CBS television show Numb3rs! This can be seen in the episode Killer Chat which first aired on Friday December 15, 2006.

Daedalus Maze on Numb3rs

A recursive fractal Maze created by Daedalus can be seen drawn on the chalkboard in the background. On the left is the Maze itself, while on the right is the Maze's solution. These scenes are roughly 23 minutes into the episode, and take place when the characters are talking about the Onion Routing method of private communication. A recursive fractal Maze was chosen for the background here, because its recursive layers are similar to the layers of an onion, and so fit the discussion.

Daedalus fractal Maze solution

Here's a close-up look of the solution path of the Maze. Note the solution shown isn't complete or accurate. The board says the solution is of length 3, however at least 6 moves are listed. Also a couple moves at the end are missing, where for a solution of depth 4 that returns to the top level, there needs to be at least 9 moves.

Daedalus fractal Maze and solution

Here's one more scene, showing the bottom part of both the Maze and the solution path.

Daedalus recursive fractal Maze

To compare the Numb3rs scene with Daedalus, here's an example of a recursive fractal Maze created in Daedalus. The maze used on the show was created with the default parameters, i.e. three chips, and 4x4 pins on each chip, as seen here.

Daedalus recursive fractal Maze solution

Here's the proper solution to the fractal Maze above. Notice the first two moves of "Enter 3W3" and "Enter 1S4" are the same as the Maze on the show. As with all fractal Mazes, you start at the "-" and end at the "+". This specific Maze can be reproduced in Daedalus by setting the "Random Seed" field in the "Random Settings" dialog to 164, and then running the "Recursive Fractal" command. As of version 3.1 one must also set the "fRndOld" macro variable to True to use the old random number generator.

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This site produced by Walter D. Pullen (see Astrolog homepage), hosted on Magitech and astrolog.org, created using Microsoft FrontPage, page last updated September 9, 2017.