A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game

Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by sterlind on Monday September 23, 2019 @09:05PM (#21055455)

Aren't most cellular automata bit matrices that evolve over time? They also tend to generalize to any size. This seems more like a recurrence relation/spigot algorithm or a cipher network of some kind.. several ciphers have look-up tables used for various things.

The tricky bit isn't just getting the desired look, it's having a non-repeating maze layout that doesn't hit dead ends. Seems hard to me..

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Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by twic on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:36AM (#21069403)

If you have a one-dimensional cellular automaton (a single row of cells), and plot its states over time in successive rows, you end up with a two-dimensional picture, eg:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2017/06/oh-my-gosh-its-c...

So you conceivably could generate mazes with a cellular automaton.

But Entombed doesn't. Figure 6 in the paper shows the geometry of the rule:

    c d e
  a b X

So it samples bits from the previous row, but also from the current row. In cellular automaton terms, the previous row is the previous timestep, but the current row is the current timestep, and a cellular automaton can't compute cells based on cells in the same timestep.

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