# A Maze of Characters

I have a maze here with me. However, this maze is quite hard to see.

w
Q
q
#
2
ñ
ÿ


The bottom of the list of characters is the start of the maze. The top is the end.

Other puzzles in this series of mazes:

• +1 for the idea. Not the most challenging of puzzles (at least for the audience of this site), but a nice one. – BmyGuest Jul 20 '16 at 6:05

Converting these UTF-8 characters to binary gives the below 7x8 array of bits. Since the bottom is all ones, and you said start at the bottom, the intention must be that you can walk along ones while zeroes are walls. The solution is to stay in the third column from the left and head up, except to jog around a zero in the second row from the top.

01110111
01010001
01110001
00100011
00110010
11110001
11111111

• Was just writing up that if it were this, it's not much of a maze – Jonathan Allan Jul 20 '16 at 3:21
• There's also another solution to it. – haykam Jul 20 '16 at 3:22
• @Peanut fundamentally different? – BmyGuest Jul 20 '16 at 6:05
• Yes. You can convert the list of characters into another maze. – haykam Jul 20 '16 at 14:22
01010111
10011000
10100100
00000010
00100011
01110001
01010001


Here one is considered as wall, and this is ASCII conversion to binary. You need to walk on zeroes from bottom.

Solutions: start from first row from left and walk up straight if blocked turn right and go for one step and again go up straight do the same if got blocked.

• You're missing the difficult part of the puzzle: What is the solution path through this (very difficult) maze? ;c) – BmyGuest Jul 20 '16 at 11:13
• @BmyGuest, Added solution of the puzzle. – Ali786 Jul 20 '16 at 11:32
• Could you explain how this is ASCII converted to binary? I thought that UTF-8 starts with ASCII as the first 128 characters, and doesn't have ñ or ÿ (maybe extended does?). So shouldn't the top row "w" be the same as the UTF-8 version, for example? – Jonathan Allan Jul 20 '16 at 15:12
• @JonathanAllan, Yes Its the decimal place equivalent of extended ñ or ÿ – Ali786 Jul 20 '16 at 15:39
• Jonathan Allan has a point: That's not a proper ASCII conversion. You've got the Q's and the hash mark, but your W is a capital letter and instead of the digit 2 (with ASCII code 50), you've got the unprintable control sequence STX. And your letters are out of order. What's labelled as UTF-8 in Mike's answer is really 8-bit extended ASCII with the Latin1 character set. (The y with dieresis is a giveaway: It is 255 in Latin1 and a frequent misinterpretation of the value −1.) The conversion used here is the DOS codepage 437, where ñ is 164 and ÿ is 152. – M Oehm Jul 20 '16 at 19:26