Oh I was on fire in research on this here (May 2019). I’m looking at the comments and I’d tracked down what braid-theory thing specifically could relate to pickup sticks.
Now the T-shape = 3D crossings is from what I was looking at vision. I ‘lit up’ again seeing ASCII first-person mazes again and narrowed my excitement down to the visual crossings indicating hallways/turns as well as wondering about distance calculations which I want to get back to.