Inspiration

Why this puzzle?

Background

In an old memory, I am with my father in his small workshop, watching as he cuts out some wooden disks. I was probably 5 or 6 and we were making a puzzle together. Three wooden vertical pegs in a row, mounted on a base with a tower of disks on the first peg. Once we finished with our woodwork, he explained the rules to me; I had to move the whole tower, one piece at a time, from one peg to another. I could use the spare peg, but should never place a larger disk on top of a smaller one. Once the tower had been successfully moved, the puzzle was complete. I remember my feeling of intrigue at being presented with this curious little challenge.

If the puzzle my father had made for me had 3, 4, may be even 5 disks, it probably took me a few minutes of fun to solve back then. But for each extra disk that we add to the puzzle, we effectively double the number of moves required for completion. Had my dad made me a 10 disk puzzle, it would have required over a thousand moves to complete.

Time

It was the early 80’s and my father was a head librarian. I didn’t know it then, but I didn’t have much longer with him until he passed away. Years later when I had my own career as a Software Engineer, I would read through some old notes of his and see how he worked with information organization, architecture and processing as I do now, but still mostly with paper instead of silicon. Most touching was to be reminded of how he had started a course in computer programming in his last years. If he had had more time, we could have learned to code together. Had we done that, I like to imagine that at some point we might have had a go at writing a program to play and perhaps solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle.\

And so…

With rather different tech than we might have used back then…

Have a play: towerofhanoi.app

And check out the code on github and give me a star (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)

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