Funny coincidence-- I have the TV news on while I’m looking through GQ, and the exact moment I click to open this link this story comes up on the news.
About two months ago, there was a huge search for a three year old that wandered into a corn field, in one of the farm communities just outside our city. These are huge farm fields! It took half a day to locate her (no cell phone :D).
Sadly this happens once every couple of years, often it’s the family dog that saves the day. Either by guarding through the night, often actually locating.
It clears the surrounding farms of people, for miles around, to search, because they all know how dangerous it is, how easily/quickly it can happen, and at least one case where it ended tragically! It likely happened, in some short term version, to one of their kids!
It is ALWAYS taken very seriously.
(Corn mazes? Not so much!)
FTFY:
**
Pumps placed at the edge
Water piped to the pivot
Obstructions: Not good**
.
This only works if the maze is a simple “tree” (in Computer Science parlance). No loops or anything. Also, there can’t be any ambiguity when a wall splits. Some corn mazes have bridges and such. So a wall can split up/down and in other ways.
But it will work for simple mazes if you start off with a hand against a wall. Once lost, it won’t work.
For a planar maze, you can get by with two markers that you can drop. But it’s going to take a lotta time. Non-planar mazes correspond to the undirected graph accessibility problem which requires deterministic log space but surprisingly no more. (Which I’m sure you were dying to know.) So no constant number of markers will do.
It happened to me as a youngster (four-ish?). And yes, my Dad sent the dog in after me. She’d run straight to me, then Dad would call her and I’d follow in the direction she went. She had to go back and forth quite a few times, but kept me going in the right direction until I was out.
I once got lost after I was wished into a cornfield, but it was a good thing.
No, this usually won’t work.
Walking in a random direction will only work if you can stay moving perfectly straight. And that’s quite hard to do, when the corn is taller than you and you can’t see landmarks. Looking behind you will help, but trampling the corn is hard work, and not that easy to see after you get a ways away – you could find yourself circling around in a nice smooth curve.
It would be better to look up into the sky at the sun (or moon or stars, at night), and then walk keeping the sun always at that same angle from your body. (Also a lot less damage to the field that you would have to pay for.)
Even easier is the method mentioned before – just follow along one of the rows of corn until you come to the edge of the field.
Steven King has lost a couple of people in corn fields.
So what did they do Airlift them out?
Yes but they were Children of the Corn so that was their naive habitat.
I’ll ask (I’m old, and have little to lose):
How is one SUPPOSED to make his way through these mazes? (I have never seen one; childhood was completely devoid of anything more complex than “Chutes and Ladders”).
Are you given a map to follow? Do they have markers within which require a sharp eye to see?
IOW: Why do people willing go into them, knowing that x% embarrass themselves by requiring rescue?
OK - maps.
nm.
The only one I have ever been in is the Davis Mega-Maze in Sterling, MA but it is supposedly the best corn maze in the world and carefully designed. You don’t get a map and it would not help anyway. The whole point is to go in and get hopelessly lost. However, it isn’t like you are trapped in some kind of agricultural nightmare the whole time. There are very large bridges that you encounter that let you see the entire field from above (not that it helps much when you go back down into the corn). There are also some cleared out sections with activities like climbing walls that you encounter as you progress. Those landmarks help you to not backtrack. They change the maze daily by roping off passages so the solution may be completely different from one day to the next. It generally takes a few hours at least to complete the whole thing but you are never in any real danger. If there is an emergency, you can cut through roped off emergency exits or even the corn itself in an extreme case to reach an edge of the maze.
The Bart solution. Works for corn as well as hedges.
dude, I’m posting from a cornfield right now.
The crows are sitting there just looking at me. It scares me…