Beboputer Maze Competition

Welcome to the first offerings in a series of mind-expanding competitions. Consider the maze shown below. This is one of two mazes that are represented as Beboputer "xxx.ram" files. (Note that the "Star" character in the upper left will be your starting point, while the smiley face in the lower right is the end point.) Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to write a program in the Beboputer's assembly language to solve these mazes.

The objective of competition #1 will be to write this program using the smallest number of bytes that you can (this number includes both instruction and data bytes). Note that there aren't any prizes apart from the satisfaction of creating your program (and getting it to work). Also, if you wish to email your solution(s) to us, we will publish a running list of the top champions.

Before you do anything else, Click here (7 K-bytes) to download a ZIPed file containing the mazes and instructions (see also the notes on ZIPed and documentation files at the bottom of this page). Note that you can download the assembly source for the various solutions by clicking on their names in the list below.

1)	Kevin Shepherd's Sock Drawer (16 K-bytes) (Occupies 72 bytes in the *Beboputer*)
2)	Dave Crabbe's Maze Runner (3 K-bytes) (Occupies 128 bytes in the *Beboputer*)
3)	Max and Alvin's MazeBot #1 (8 K-bytes) (Occupies 214 bytes in the *Beboputer*)
4)	Your name and program go here :-)
5)	Your name and program go here :-)

Both of the mazes we provided for the above competition were of a type that allows them to be solved using a simple algorithm, which is to conceptually hold one's left hand against the wall and to keep it there as you stroll through the maze. But now consider the following offering from "Beboputerite" Kevin Shepherd:

This type of maze can't be solved using a "left-hand-on-the-wall" approach, and all of the solutions shown above will fail to solve it (try it if you wish). Kevin also provides a solution and documentation with his "Mazebot2" offering below. Once again the objective of competition #2 will be to write a program to solve this type of maze using the smallest number of bytes that you can.

1)	Kevin Shepherd's MazeBot2 (18 K-bytes) (Occupies 173 bytes in the *Beboputer*)
2)	Your name and program go here :-)
3)	Your name and program go here :-)
4)	Your name and program go here :-)
5)	Your name and program go here :-)

Over the course of time we will add additional brain-teasers to the pot to keep you on your toes (feel free to send us your suggestions for any future competitions).

Note that any documentation files that you may find in the ZIP'ed files have been created using either the "NotePad" or "WordPad" editors, both of which are provided as standard with Microsoft Windows 95.

Also note that the majority of the files that you can download from these pages have been compressed (or ZIP'ed). After downloading any of these "*.zip" files, use WinZip(R) by Nico Mak Computing (http://www.winzip.com/) or PKZIP(R) by PKWare, Inc. (http://www.pkware.com/) to access that file's contents. Both of these products are available in tryout/evaluation versions.