Regular readers of the Wolfram Blog will have seen that the item that I wrote on solving mazes using morphological image processing was thoroughly beaten by the much smarter and better read, Daniel Lichtblau from our Scientific Information Group in his post "Navigating the Blenheim Maze”. Always up for a challenge (and feeling a little guilty about the rather hacky and lazy way I tried to deal with loops and multiple paths the first time), I am back for another go. My first approach with any new problem is to think about the nearest available Mathematica command. In the new Mathematica 8 features is a graph theory command FindShortestPath. That certainly sounds promising. Mixing image processing and graph theory may sound complicated, but one of the central strengths of Mathematica's integrated all-in-one design is that different functionality works together, and in this case it proves to be quite easy.

I read Jon McLoone's recent "aMazeing Image Processing in Mathematica" post with some interest. It showed how to import an image of a maze, and then use image processing functions in Mathematica (some new to Version 8) to draw paths through the maze. What fun! I then observed, to my dismay, that there was no way to determine a "good" path. Frankly, I was disappointed. I decided that there must be ways to do this in Mathematica. One approach would involve forming a graph. We would have vertices at points where the maze path forks, and we would make weighted edges from approximated distances between these vertices. New functionality in Mathematica supports these graph methods. Unfortunately I am not yet familiar with it.

Ever since I wrote the "Doing Spy Stuff with Mathematica" blog post, I have had a feeling that I am being watched. Time to build some office security using Mathematica Home Edition! First, I am going to make use of an imminent new Mathematica command CurrentImage, which will import a real-time image from a video device. Let's get some test images using the webcam on my laptop.

Practically everything I know about British art history would fit in one BBC documentary—the very BBC documentary I watched a little while ago. I was intrigued to learn about the The Ambassadors, a sixteenth-century painting by Holbein. Among other things, this painting is famous for containing a human skull hidden in plain sight. Can you see it?

I have a lot to study at the moment, as I learn how to use the technology that's in our development pipeline. One of the first features I played with was so much fun I thought I would share it with you. You will be able to efficiently and easily texture map over any 3D image. Texture mapping has all kinds of practical uses for improving visualization, but the first thing that I thought of was setting fire to a plot...