Puzzles and Games

By day, Andrea Gilbert is a humble British software engineer. By night, she is one of the forerunners in the development of what have been called by different people mazes-with-rules, multi-state mazes or logic mazes.

Her website, clickmazes, is a top-ranked result for "mazes" on Google and receives a thousand visitors daily. Two of her puzzles have been admitted into Puzzles.com's Hall of Fame, and one has even been turned into a popular toy.

We talked with Ms. Gilbert about her history and the process of making unique and incredible mazes.

Puzzle Monster: Tell us a little about yourself.

Andrea Gilbert: I live in Oxfordshire, England. I have a BSc degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. I am a software-engineer by trade. It was my desire to learn the Java programming language back in the late 90s, partly for professional purposes, that helped kick-start my website.

PM: How did you develop as a maze-maker?

AG: Mazes fascinated me as a child. I started drawing them at a very early age, longer ago than I can remember.

The logic of maze drawing is limited however, and not very intellectually challenging. By my teens I was looking for ways to make my mazes more 'grown-up' - more challenging for me as a designer, and less monotonous for my audience to solve. Firstly I started exploring structure and patterns (pipes, weaves, knot-work, 3D-surfaces etc). Then simple logical constructs such as arrows. Inevitably I found myself incorporating more and more rules and logic, just because I needed new challenges.

Only with the advent of the web did I discover there were others out there like me, who had made the same journey, and 'invented' many of the same ideas along the way.

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