Here a maze challenge from my book:

* Enter this maze and find the exit

* When you've found the exit, try to determine the shortest route from entrance to exit

If you like this challenge and succeed, you may post your solution in this thread (photo/scan).
I'll applaude for the quickest correct solution.


Have fun!

Splinter

PS Tom Cutrofello has blogged about the E-book (Gabrielmpf, thanks for directing me to Tom).

That is an incredible and eye-boggling maze!

I'll print it off now and give it a go when I get home.

How about this:

Shorter than mine!

I'm amazed by the speed of the replies. Applause for that already

As all can see: up till now Gus's route is the shortest presented, but it can even be somewhat shorter still.

Competition is not yet over I'd say....

PS Seeing the huge capabilities of some members in this forum: if anyone thinks this puzzle could be actually created (in a simple way from this 2-D routing) in 3-D e.g. via 3-D printing (with actual tunnels and bridges), I'm very interested.

Great news, Splinter, congrats
That maze looks scary...
Oh, and the 3D idea is very interesting

How simple this would be to do depends on how the maze was originally drawn - if you could output a dxf file or similar (i.e. contains real drawing lines, not just pixels) then it would be a lot easier.

The maze is created with Microsoft Visio Pro; export formats are all the general 2-D formats.
dwg and dxf are indeed possible export formats.
But I myself am not capable to extract from these drawing formats information to put into layers/floors for actual mazes (if I'd have to do such, I'll end up creating the whole maze from start again directly in 3-D. Which would cost me I think some hundred hours or more, which I don't have. Therefore my request).

For the people later seeing this topic (and in a glance thinking all is solved):

Gus is close, but there's still a somewhat shorter route to find....

Not sure if this is shorter but...

It took me some time, and:

yes, your route is shorter than the route of Gus.


How do I know: my route is shorter than Gus's, and your route length is very close (applause!) (and partly different; applause!) to mine.

But my route is still slightly shorter as I measured it. (approx. 1.5 cm when you print your image on A4)

If I print it on a postage stamp, my route is very short indeed.

PS. Am I allowed to roll the paper round so that the exit touches the entrance already?

The red path here can be used to cut out part of oxymoronicuber's path but I think his is shorter.



Carl

I've planned to do an applause round at 15:00hrs CET, so if you want to join the challenge: there are 6 hours left....

Also I'll then present the (to my knowledge) shortest route (when not found by that time).


Hint for the shortest route: it has only 2 crossings with itself (like Gus's clean solution)...

No, I would consider such cheating
(route then is virtually 0 cm)

But would be a nice idea for an actual puzzle, to have this in cylinder-shape.
Only would not know how to create this in a 'simple' way....

Wrap-around screen scrolling.

And here is the shortest route

APPLAUSE to:

GUS for:
- being the first to present a solution
- presenting a clean solution with straigth lines and few crossings

OXYMORONICUBER for:
- his endurance to improve on his solution
- coming closest to the shortest route

WWWMWWW (Carl) for:
- joining the challenge


I've pm'ed the above members for the (small) reward they've won.

I know I am a little late (being in a different time zone), but here is my solution which is pretty close to your proposed shortest route.

And here is a short route, but MONKEYMAN found the shortest

APPLAUSE to:

GUS for:
- being the first to present a solution
- presenting a clean solution with straigth lines and few crossings

OXYMORONICUBER for:
- his endurance to improve on his solution
- coming closest to the shortest route

WWWMWWW (Carl) for:
- joining the challenge

MONKEYMAN for:
- presenting a solution with only one crossing in the route, making him an extra winner
I'll check next week whether his route may be even the shortest. It seems pretty short.

Update: when printed on A4, Monkeyman's solution is a staggering 7.2 cm shorter than my proposed shortest route. So definitely a winner!

I've pm'ed the above members for the (small) reward they've won.

So what's the longest (non-overlapping) route?

<bump?>

I also got another pm comment that it is nice to have a challenge for the weekend once and a while.
So a challenge where I also haven't looked into the solution already:

Challenge 1 (Jared's):
- Find the longest non-overlapping route, starting at the start point or at the endpoint (whichever you think leads to a longest route)


Challenge 2:
- Find out whether there's a route from start to end with no overlap involved


As I've little time coming weeks to measure routes presented for challenge 1, I hope it can be seen at an instance (without measuring) whose presented route is longest


Have a nice try!