Compression Maze follows the principal of every other maze except for one big difference: the space between the walls gradually decreases as you get closer to the centre.
This means there is plenty of room on the outer regions, but gradually as you wander deeper, the whole experience gets more claustrophobic and nightmarish to the point where shuffling along sideways is the only way to negotiate the narrowing passageways between the high walls.-- xenzag, Nov 04 2021 + cool concept, great title. Have a scary croissant!-- xandram, Nov 04 2021 Using the word "doom" in your idea title always adds an edge to any creative notion. For example: who wouldn't want to read what "Sink Plug Of Doom" was all about? Or how about "The Deckchairs Of Doom". Of course in the Compression Maze Of Doom there is nothing to prevent a sort of physical event horizon from being created whereby, having squeezed along the narrow passageways, the foolhardy explorer finds themselves not in the centre of the maze after all. Oh no, they are actually confronted by a large number of identical slot like portals that line both sides of a very long corridor. This is because in the Maze of Doom there is no centre. There is only more and more maze. Now you know what the doom bit really means!-- xenzag, Nov 05 2021 [a1] To avoid the wall-spacing giving you a clue that you're getting near the centre, you could instead have a maze where all the walls start a normal distance apart but over time *all* the walls get very gradually closer together. The walls would be move so slowly that you wouldn't notice their movement but after a while you'd find the passages so narrow as to be almost impassable, and then they'd start to crush you as you squeezed through them, overcome by panic and a mounting sense of claustrophobic dread.(also sp. "principal/principle")-- hippo, Nov 05 2021 Moving walls would be no good, [hippo], because you'd run short of places for them to move to. You'd need shrinking walls.
I wonder what material, with an enormous coefficient of thermal expansion, would also be rigid enough to crush the victim.
This is where we miss [8th]; he would know.-- pertinax, Nov 05 2021 [pert] I'm not sure - you could make the walls out of huge flexible rubber tubes, which are inflated very slowly as you wander around the maze-- hippo, Nov 05 2021 Years ago on The Avengers, there was an episode where the rooms of a house moved around to create a type of maze. I've always liked mazes, and moving features are welcome features. In the Compression Maze I was attempting to vary the one element that remains constant in most mazes - the space between the walls. I have other maze ideas and will post at a future date.-- xenzag, Nov 05 2021 Behind the walls you could have very large thermal springs, like the type of bimetallic strips inside old thermostats.
There's the simple wax plug phase-change style which is used to open and close valves. Many of those could move a wall a few inches.
How big can nitonol be manufactured?-- RayfordSteele, Nov 05 2021 I mean, there's nothing wrong with the paths narrowing as you get closer to the center, as long as all paths do, whether they're dead ends or not. As a overly simple example, a double spiral with one path that dead ends just shy of the center and one that gets there. You'd have no way of knowing which one was correct until you hit the dead end. In the more complex version, you might sometimes have to backtrack away from the center, so, again, the narrowing gives some information, but not sufficient to solve the maze.
As far as the shrinking version, you don't need just an expanding material, you need fully anisotropic one. That is, it expands into the path in only one direction, remains a constant height in another, and variably expands or narrows in the third depending on whether it's on the inside or outside of the curve. I think you're going to have to go with some very careful servo drive design rather than a simple material selection.-- MechE, Nov 05 2021 Reminds me of "Diamond Dogs" by Alastair Reynolds -- sci-fi horror story about navigating a tower that keeps getting smaller-- sninctown, Nov 05 2021 If you left the maze backwards it would be the Decompression Maze of Mood.-- AusCan531, Nov 08 2021 + love it, also love [AusCan531]'s backwards idea!-- Treejuice, Nov 08 2021 Looking down from the top of mazes I'm quite good at them. From the inside I'm hopeless. What does this say about my intelligence?-- Voice, Nov 08 2021 //From the inside I'm hopeless.//
You're in a maze, and out of SSRIs?-- pertinax, Nov 08 2021 random, halfbakery