In unicursal mazes, the navigable space is bounded and a single path is set; users have no directional decisions to make, save to follow the meanderings of the path, leaving their attention, mind, or emotions free to wander or focus elsewhere, while continuing to the end at the center of the maze or to a unique exit. The unicursal maze sometimes allegorizes temporality, offering a spiritual and contemplative space to the walker. Unicursal mazes can be traversed repeatedly and ritualistically for peace and spiritual comfort. In unicursal hedge mazes the hedges often limit one's vision to an immediate and foreshortened horizon, suggesting enclosure and protection.
Multicursal mazes, by contrast, ask to be solved. Instead of following the unicursal maze's predetermined path, visitors to a multicursal maze run the risk of getting lost as they attempt to find the exit.
The Knossos maze is best understood in terms of Theseus' narrative path through it, not as the space of the labyrinth itself. This transformation from multicursal, unknowable confusion to a marked and bounded pathway reflects the mastery of any system, from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, mapped and tamed.
Church mazes are usually meant to be walked or crawled on the path to penance. The names of these include Labyrinth of Sin, The Path to Redemption, and The Path to Jerusalem. These pathways symbolized paths to Christian salvation, relating a Paschal instead of a Minoan mystery.
Mazes are usually imagined as architectural, material, and fixed, but cultures have long noticed that they can correspond directly to a human activity, dance. In The Iliad, Homer credits Daedalus both with a dance floor and a labyrinth. Kern speculates that the labyrinth was a choros, which has the double meaning of dance and dance surface. Given that no labyrinthine buildings survive in Crete, the depictions of labyrinths on coins may indicate the path of a dance–particularly since maze dances have survived.
The first maze constructed for rats by researchers was built in the late 1890s–but it was not originally used for testing the creatures. Willard Small of Clark University built a maze environment to allow rats to eat and exercise when they weren't taking part in experiments. Small wanted the environment to simulate the burrows that rats inhabit in nature, but he modeled the first laboratory rat maze after the Hampton Court Palace maze (Lemov 2005, 25). The restorative maze is quite consonant with the purposes for which the Hampton Court Palace maze was built, although Small was attending to the constitution of rodents rather than royals.
Since a random occurrence is "hap," the root of happy, it might seem that "random" would have a happy etymology. This this is not so. In centuries past, before the philosophers and mathematicians in the Age of Enlightenment sought to rationalize chance, randomness was a nightmare. Likely ancestors of the word "random" are found in Anglo-Norman, Old French, and Middle French and include randoun, raundoun, randun, and rendon – words signifying speed, impulsiveness, and violence. These early forms are found beginning around the twelth century and probably derive from randir, to run fast or gallop)
Four fundamental categories of games [...] Whereas agon are competitive games dependent upon skill, games of mimicry are imaginative, and ilinx are games causing disorder and loss of control, the alea are games of chance. [...] Taken from the Latin name for dice games, alea "negates work, patience, experience, and qualifications" so that everything depends on luck.
Malaby presents a useful framework for understanding indeterminacy based on four categories. The first category is formal indeterminacy, or what is commonly referred to as chance. This is any form of random allotment, which often can be understood and modeled through statistical methods. Malaby argues that the ascendancy of statistical thinking in the social sciences has so skewed our conception of indeterminacy in gambling (in particular) and in our lives (in general) that formal indeterminacy has become a stand-in for other types of indeterminacies. The second category is social indeterminacy, the impossibility of knowing or understanding someone else's point of view or intentions. A bluff is a type of social indeterminacy. The third category is performative indeterminacy, that is, the unreliability and one's own or of another's actions, say a fumble in football game or misreading the information in plain view on a chessboard. Finally, the fourth category Malaby describes, cosmological indeterminacy, refers to skepticism about the fairness and legitimacy of the rules of the game in the first place at a local, institutional, or cosmological level. Suspicion that a game is rigged, for example, is concern about cosmological indeterminacy.
Duchamp, like the other Dada artists with whom he associated, saw "logical reality" as a failure, epitomized by the horrors of World War I. Satire, absurdity, and the embrace of indeterminacy seemed to the Dadaists to be the most "reasonable" response to modernity.
Yet, centuries ago, long before Mallarme provided his assurance that a throw of the dice would not abolish chance, ̈Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of this event as apocalyptic:
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
In every city and in every town.
Fortune's wheel and what Paul Auster called The Music of Chance have long been considered a matter of life and death.
