The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth

Those turns are unreal, it looks like the mouse is simply teleporting across across certain parts of the maze

The section about the mouse choosing the longer but straighter path really struck home with me. Too often in map software, and even games with a GPS system, the "shorter" path will be taken, even though the longer path is actually faster when factoring in deceleration, waiting at stop signs, etc. It's really a fascinating area for optimization.

Probably this might get lost in the sea of comments, but I just want to say that this video made me choose my first club at my university. We have an IEEE club, and it has a micromouse year-long project. I was so thrilled when I first heard about it. I am a CS major, but I've dabbled a little in electronics. I am exited about how it is going to go for me.

Whoever does the animations to accompany the explanations for these videos deserves a raise! Those were top notch and absolutely vital to the effectiveness of this video!

Sure the mice are cool, but can we talk about the animations at 8:40? So impressive! No idea how they were made, but it really helped understand the concepts. Hats off to the team behind them.

One thing I like about this engineering competition is that, since there aren't heavy financial incentives involved (like pretty much any other engineering project), people are given the chance to try whatever they want and be as innovative as they like.

Humans are absolutely beautiful. Both the people competing and over 12 million people on YouTube are invested in the idea of making a tiny robot solve a maze and it’s so random and came from just one person and now it’s huge. Sometimes I need things like this to remind me humans are pretty neat sometimes

Man, this is fascinating. Initially I thought this was a remote controlled competition, but after seeing how fast they were moving I knew that wasn't possible. It's really impressive what we can do with robotics these days, even on such a small scale!

As an electronic engineer, this is one of the most epic electronic engineering vids I've seen. Thanks Veritasium

As one of those who missed the podium of the All-Japan Competition this year, I can tell you that the level at which they are competing for the champion is on a completely different level. one of them mentioned that he changed the optical rotary encoder disc from plastic to paper, making it 0.15g lighter!

14:16 I love the shocked reactions from the spectators.

Thanks for this very interesting video. Many years ago, Richard Browne, who worked as a technician for Bell Telephone, had seen an article published in the company newsletter that described and showed pictures of Claude Shannon's electronic mouse. Knowing that the mouse used telephone relays to control its motions and solve the problem and having access to scrapped telephone relays, he restored some relays and set out to duplicate the whole thing. The original published article did not detail how it was all done, so my friend figured it out for himself. I remember that the memory for each of the 25 cells of the maze area required two relays which recorded the direction the mouse had last left that cell. Near the end of this machine's life ,somewhere around the late 1970s, I met and became friends with Richard. I saw the machine myself and was thrilled by how well it worked. Later, Richard went on to build marble machines, intricate wooden machines that allowed a marble to pass through various gravity-driven paths. Sadly, Richard passed away in 2013, but you can still see his videos about some of his marble machines. Although never completed, his grandest machine, called Marble Machine 3, was one of his creations described by Richard in videos here on YouTube.

As an electronics engineer this was one of my favorite projects that I have ever done. From the firmware, circuit design , algorithms and mechanical design every part of this robot is just pure absolute joy of engineering.

My respect to all the previous engineers of the past whose mouse was really slow, their consistency to push this competition further paved the way for today's modern engineers. This is one of the prime examples of what humanity can achieve while working together generation by generation.

It was neat watching the engineering evolve from just mapping the maze to taping off the wheels to increase traction

Gotta say my thanks as this video helped me create a first person maze game based on the maze circuit designs on the video for a university project and the panel/judge loved it with the addition of a horror theme through sounds, lighting, and objects in the distance. It was also interesting to learn about the micromouse competition while I was at it and I was able to replicate the diagonal movements the micromouse make on the mazes on my game. Thank you again.

Once you understand what goes into mouse navigation, this goes from appearing as odd nerd behavior to something genuinely impressive.

Man, seriously.. The guys behind the video editing and simulations in your videos are pure genius. Wish I could meet such guys to learn from.

Great episode, thank you for doing all the research behind it. Love the explanations you gave, the algorithms behind it and the special moments over time :)

I havent seen this pop up here yet but Theseus is a pretty good name for essentially the precursor to AI. The Theseus' Ship paradox goes like "if we replace every single piece of a ship over time, can we still call it the same ship?" Because if you compare the final version to the first version, literally everything has been swapped out and yet, on an individual basis, the majority of the ship has always stayed the same. We build out home tower PCs on the same grounds. And while the core idea of a mouse solving a labyrinth has remained the same, pretty much every component of the original Theseus has been improved on, swapped out or both.