Physicists have designed the world’s trickiest maze – can you solve it?

Who doesn’t love a good puzzle? Well, possibly anyone who tries this one, branded the ‘world’s most amazingly difficult’ maze by the scientists behind it.

The maze, a mesmerising pattern of curves and spikes, was inspired by a knight moving around a chess board – and a meteorite.

Knights, which move in an L shape, can visit every square on the chess board 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 in strange matter known as quasicrystals.

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

Basically, they’re all over the place, and mapping them is very hard.

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

They have, however, been created in labs, and also accidentally after the 1945 Trinity Test, the atomic bomb explosion as part of the Manhattan Project depicted in the film Oppenheimer.

To try to find some order in these quirky characters, Dr Felix Flicker and his colleagues used Hamilton cycles to map every atom on the surface of certain quasicrystals only once, like the knight on the chessboard, and discovered they made remarkably intricate and complex mazes – known in the biz as fractals.

‘We show that certain quasicrystals provide a special case in which the problem is unexpectedly simple,’ said Dr Felix. ‘In this setting, we therefore render some seemingly-impossible problems tractable. This could include practical purposes spanning different realms of science.’

One such problem could even be the issue of climate change.

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

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

‘Quasicrystals are also brittle, meaning they readily break into tiny grains. This maximises their surface area for adsorption.’

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

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

If you didn’t, don’t feel bad, it is very difficult. Although, and this is a bit of a blow, it is the ‘easier’ of the two mazes the team created.

You’ll need to zoom in to tackle the harder one below – and no, we didn’t complete it.

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