I don't know what Max's ultimate aim is with this project, but in my headcanon he's eventually going to recreate the Encarta maze game.
@Lord Roem
Strictly speaking, it's about illustrating the notion of a topological space, which is to say "the most general description of space you can think of."
Like, you start with ordinary three-dimensional space, but then you generalize it, so you can have as many dimensions as possible. And then you generalize it further, so that it doesn't have to be Euclidean, it can be curved. And then you generalize it even further, so that it isn't even necessary that the number of dimensions are the same at every point, and it might not even be possible to define such a notion as a distance between two points. And let's get rid of the very notion of dimensionality. Ah, but when you get away with the notion of dimensionality, what do you mean by point, since the very term point seems to imply the existence of some notion of dimensionality, since a point is something with dimension zero...
And on and on and on... and eventually you end up with topological space, which is
the most basic, most general conception of space that mankind has hitherto constructed.
The ultimate aim of this project is to illustrate the idea of "it is possible for two locations to have the same neighbourhoods but still in some sense be distinct".
The first part was the illustration with Rome and the Vatican. Since the Vatican is contained in Rome, every neighbourhood of Rome has to be a neighbourhood of the Vatican.
Here, however, we have a blue box, which contains a red box, which contains a green box, which contains a yellow box, which contains the original blue box. The blue box and the yellow box are "different", but are still "the same" in that every neighbourhood of one has to be a neighbourhood of the other.