Puzzle Description:

The Tower of Hanoi is a logic puzzle based on a legend from Vietnam. The country's flag fills the upper-right corner.

#1: Teresa K (fasstar) on Aug 12, 2009 [SPOILER]

Interesting idea. I am familiar with this "puzzle." It is used by psychologists to measure the function of a person's frontal lobes that govern the Executive Functions.

I work with individuals whose frontal lobes are damaged from prenatal exposure to alcohol, and they usually have difficulty with this test. In real life, this means they have difficulty with problem solving and planning ahead. There are other areas of Executive Function that are impaired by alcohol exposure, but this is the one that is measured by the Tower of Hanoi test.

Here's a link to the legend behind the Tower of Hanoi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi
It's very interesting. I was not familiar with this legend.

Here is an online test where you can do it yourself:
http://www.intelligencetest.com/mindgames/hanoi.htm

Thanks for your entry Bethany.

When teaching programming it is almost always the example used to first demonstrate the power of recursion. I wonder if the brains executive functions are in any way related to recursion.

I would think so, Jan. To understand and write recursive programming, one would need good working memory and solid cause-and-effect thinking, and be ability to plan through sequences and predict outcomes, all of which utilize executive functions.

Recursion in programming makes my head hurt just to think about. I am more familiar with linguistic recursion. If anyone wonders what recursion is, think Fibonacci and Sierpinski.

Interesting stuff...

I love those type of puzzles. Thanks for you puzzle!

Very good puzzle and background info. At first I thought it was another Red Fred or Blue Bob puzzle. What do we call the green man?

I've done that logic puzzle countless times and never knew it's name, the legend or that it might be used to test brain function. Interesting stuff. I do remember being a little confused the first time because it wasn't made immediately clear to me that pieces could be placed back onto the existing stack. Once that was made clear it seemed really simple. That probably makes more sense if I also explain that the first time I played it, it started with 3 disks and one was added each time it was solved. There was no dilemna at 3 disks but 4 presented the problem of placing a disk on the original stack to make the third move.

I vote we call him Green Gary.

I also fit into what Jan said - I learned about this puzzle when learning recursive programming. It also reminds me of the water jug problem:

You have 3 pitchers - an 8qt, a 5qt and a 3qt. The 8qt pitcher is filled with the liquid of your choice. Your task is to fill both the 8qt and 5qt pitcher with exactly 4qts of liquid.

in order left to right we will have the 8 qt then the 5 qt then the 3 qt pitchers:

you start out:
8 0 0
3 5 0
3 2 3
6 2 0
6 0 2
1 5 2
1 4 3
4 4 0

Goto next topic

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