Physicists have designed the world’s most complicated maze – can you solve it? | Technical News

Who doesn’t love a good puzzle? Well, probably anyone who tries it, dubbed ‘the world’s hardest maze’ by the scientists behind it.

The labyrinth, a fascinating pattern of twists and turns, was inspired by a knight moving around a chessboard – and a meteorite.

Knights, who move in an L-shape, can visit each square on the chessboard only once and return to their starting point in a pattern known as a Hamiltonian cycle.

Theoretical physicists, led by the University of Bristol, used a Hamiltonian cycle to map atoms into strange materials known as quasicrystals.

Most crystals, such as salt or diamonds, are arranged in perfect patterns that repeat in three dimensions. Quasicrystals, however, are mathematically described as living in six dimensions. Mind blowing.

Basically, they are everywhere, and drafting them is very difficult.

They are also very rare, having only been found in nature in one rock from outer space, the Khatyrka meteorite, found in Russia in 2011.

However, they were created in laboratories, and also accidentally after the 1945 Trinity Test, the detonation of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project depicted in the film Oppenheimer.

To try to find some order in these strange characters, Dr Felix Flicker and his colleagues used Hamiltonian cycles to map each atom on the surface of some quasicrystals just once, like knights on a chessboard, and discovered that they made extremely intricate and complex mazes – known in the biz as fractals.

“We show that some quasicrystals provide a special case in which the problem is unexpectedly simple,” said Dr Felix. “In this environment, we make some seemingly impossible problems solvable. This may include practical purposes involving different fields of science.’

One such problem could be the issue of climate change.

Many hope that a solution to the crisis may be to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through adsorption. At the moment this is often done using crystals to which CO2 molecules are attached, and the team hopes that quasicrystals and their complex structures could be even more efficient at trapping the greenhouse gas.

Co-author Shobhna Singh, a PhD researcher at Cardiff University, said: ‘Our work also shows that quasicrystals can be better than crystals for some adsorption applications. For example, bent molecules will find more ways to land on the irregularly arranged atoms of quasicrystals.

Quasicrystals are also brittle, meaning they break easily into small grains. This maximizes their surface area for adsorption.’

Which is great news, but – let’s be honest – now everyone just wants to know how to crack that nasty maze.

First of all, like most annoying puzzles, there is more than one solution. As you will see below, marked in red is just one way out of the maze. If you found this or another, congratulations – now you should go and apply for Mensa.

If you haven’t, don’t feel bad, it’s very difficult. Although, and this is a bit of a kick, it is the “easier” of the two mazes the team created.

You’ll have to zoom in to tackle the hardest one below – and no, we’re not done.

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