ELEN1004: ENGINEERING DESIGN AND SKILLS
PROJECT 1: MAZE NAVIGATION (LEARNING HOW TO SOLVE PROBLEMS)
A TECHNICAL REPORT BY:
MUSA TIMOTHY MUKANSI
(STUDENT NO. 1393636)
ABSTRACT:
This technical report defines a maze, its varying forms, its part in improving learning methods, and identifies many traditional methods to solving mazes.
1.1 INTRODUCTION – WHAT IS A MAZE?
The English dictionary describes a maze as a highly-complicated inter-communication of passages, i.e. a labyrinth. The dictionary also goes further to define a maze as any non-simple network that causes both confusion and bewilderment.
1.2 EXAMPLES OF MAZES
Mazes are all around us, for example, a textbook can be a maze. You have to page your way through the vast sea of raw knowledge that the book offers in order to find information that is relevant to you in that moment in time. Your city or town is also a maze since you have to navigate through the undulating, exhausting streets (that at times even feel tedious) just to find that one address that could be your home, your school or a perfectly generic shop. The same applies for your school, your local library and even your own home! If you were immersed into any of these places for the first time, you would have a very tough time finding your way through them and you would even, eventually, become very frustrated by these mazes.
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One of the world’s most famous garden mazes in the world are the Dole Plantation in Oahu, Hawaii (which is allegedly the longest garden maze in the world) , the Reignac-sur-Indre in France and the Cherry Crest Adventure Farm in America . All these garden mazes offer the perfect contemporary definition of what a maze is and we can take them as a metaphor for the mazes we must navigate through in our
Pan’s Labyrinth is unique such that the film’s storyline is based on a fairytale: it is parable; a simplified story of a greater spiritual or moral
The Book “Amusing The Million”, written by John F. Kasson describes how the amusement parks in Coney Island changed the attitude towards new cultures in the United States. Kasson talks about the era of famous amusement parks which began in 1895 before the first world war. These amusement parks were an effort to bring together the different cultures seen in the urban cities. Coney Island was a cultural accommodation for all the people who desired adventure and excitement.
An individual’s life journey is linked to the process of enlightenment, which can be achieved when one realizes the world they have been dwelling in is an illusion and is not under their own control. The science-fiction movie The Matrix, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, and Golden-Globe award winning film The Truman Show all have the same underlying theme of escaping an artificial reality. “The Allegory of the Cave” is a dialogue that criticizes human perception. In the dialogue, prisoners draw a parallel between the dwellers in the cave who believe the shadows on the walls are real to humans who believe in perceptions based on empirical knowledge.
In modern storytelling, it is common to use comparisons to make details easier to understand and lead the audience to a certain conclusion. A much more complicated form of this comparison is juxtaposition. Juxtaposition occurs when an author places two ideas/concepts/characters parallel to each other in order to compare them. The film Pan’s Labyrinth written and directed by Guillermo del Toro serves as a splendid illustration of juxtaposition in film. Beginning with the protagonist Ofelia in 1944 Franco-era Spain, the director presents the parallels between the evils of Ofelia’s make believe world and those evils belonging to the fascist regime and her step-father, General Vidal who is representative of this regime.
The movie, Pan’s Labyrinth, comments on the nature of monstrosity among and
In the novel Candide written by Voltaire, one of the main motifs is the garden. It has been mentioned multiple times throughout the book. The first garden was the Castle of baron Thunder-Ten- Tronckh, there is the garden of Eldorado, and Candide's final garden. As a main motif, the garden symbolizes people's lives and how they must nurture them to have a good outcome. The garden is used cleverly throughout the novel to convey an optimistic moral about the importance of gardens' cultivation that determines the life and fate of the characters.
“An unexamined life is a life not worth living” - Socrates. Both ‘The Matrix’ and Plato’s allegory of ‘The Cave’ develops a question of reality and how the world is perceived. This can be closely connected to one of the great Greek philosopher’s sayings where an “unexamined life is a life not worth living”. Socrates states this due to the increasing number of citizens who lived their lives without questioning the world around them. ‘The Matrix’ and Plato’s allegory explore how when the world is properly examined the outcome is a new understanding and perception of life.
His dread of the figurative characters inside his head allows him to comprehend his general surroundings. The monsters that lived in his head as well as the ‘abandoned house’ mirrors the "monstrous" wrongdoing that has been committed by the grown-ups of Acqua Traverse. After the discovery of the ‘boy in the hole’ his fear of the ‘bogeymen’ becomes a reality after realising that his father has been
The maze runner is a young adult, science fiction and post-apocalyptic book that has the purpose of introducing the reader into a fantasy world where things can get a little out of control and surviving remains the main focus. The story starts mysteriously with the title character named Thomas, a teenage boy, who wakes up with no memory after arriving with a moving box into a Glade surrounded by a Maze. The book explores different psychological stages of the characters and help up understand how it is like to live with no memory and surrounded by people you do not know. The author, a young man also, has a particular interest in adventure and survival plots due to their excitement upon readers. The author came with the idea of writing a novel involving a crowd of teenagers trapped into an unbreakable Maze filled with hideous creatures while he was dreaming.
Ap Language Summative Assesment Unit 1 Lamin Williams 9-12-16 4A Mrs. Archer In “ The Allegory of the Cave” 360 BCE, Plato emphasises that the cave explains human existence and envisions the world as a dark cave, and humans trapped as prisoners in that cave. Using symbolism he supports this statement by demonstrating to his students that our minds conceive the sources of shadows and the material world we live in as false truths. His purpose is directed towards his students, to help others out of the cave, to reveal the burden of false truths also know as the shadows. Plato uses a didactic tone to help his students understand and encourage them not to stay in the cave, but to free themselves and help others become free of the shadows the
The Maze Runner is an adventurous novel that takes that takes the reader on a journey of teamwork and survival. The main characters in The Maze Runner are Thomas, Teresa, Minho, and Alby. The story is told through Thomas point of view. Thomas character is described as being
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a gorgeously realised tale of fantasy and horror, set against the backdrop of post-Civil War Spain. The story follows a young girl, Ofelia, who travels to the countryside with her ill mother to live with her new stepfather, Vidal, a captain in Franco’s Fascist army. The film explores how Ofelia uses her imagination as a copying mechanism to deal with the monstrosities of her reality as well as to interpret the horrific events unfolding around her. Del Toro employs a number of cinematic devices including cinematography, sound and editing to effectively draw parallels between Ofelia’s reality and imagination, ultimately creating a powerful film that condemns the nature of Fascism.
For example, the Gladers thought that they will never make it out of the Maze, but they took chances and by doing that they were able to successfully escape the Maze. Other themes include, friendship, bravery, persistence, and reflection. In the novel, at one point Thomas witnessed two people struggling to get inside the walls of the maze, so Thomas decided to go inside the maze and help them out. He was then assigned to be in the Slammer for a day because of him breaking the number 1 rule, which is to never enter the maze unless you are a runner. "I didn 't do anything wrong.
This novel is about three lonely children: Mary, who is sent to England because of her parent’s death by cholera in India; Colin, a cousin with full of hatred and even more unpleasant than Mary is; and Martha 's brother Dickon, who has the power to delight both people and animals, Without Dickon neither Mary nor Colin would be able to boost their health and happiness as much as they do. The main character, Mary, is a disagreeable, sour, unhappy, unpleasant and perhaps ugly girl. She has never experienced love because her mother has hardly liked Mary. She is so awfully lonely. Because of her parents’ death by cholera, Mary is sent to England where she is going to learn to experience friendship and magic.
Running the Maze Imagine being trapped inside of a place with no memory of how you got there and the only way to get out was through a maze. James Dashner’s young adult, science fiction novel, The Maze Runner is about just that. There were a brunch of themes in the novel but the most important ones were maintaining rules and orders, making sacrifices, never giving up, and manipulation, even though something may look simple it might be harder than it seems. All these themes were practiced by Thomas and other Gladers in the Glade. Dashner also wrote the sequels to the Maze Runner, The Scorch Trials and Death Cure.