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That’s 18446744073709551615 moves! Can you even read that number? If they do one move per second and do every move in the correct order, they would still need 585 billion years to solve the puzzle! So we don’t really need to worry about that end of the world thing anytime soon. With 5 pieces, the minimum number of moves is 31! And so on…įor every new piece we add, the minimum number of moves doubles (+ 1 on top of that)! The formula used to calculate this is 2 n-1, where n is a number of pieces used.ĭo you remember our monks who are trying to solve the puzzle with 64 pieces? They would need 2 64-1 moves at a minimum. Hanoi Tower Mathĭid you already try to solve the Tower of Hanoi and it looks simple? Try to solve the puzzle with 3 pieces in 7 moves. An additional challenge is to solve the puzzle in the minimum number of moves. You can play with any number of pieces and it’s getting progressively harder with each new piece. And the third is that the disk can’t be moved on top of the smaller disk, just on top of the larger disk or on the empty spot. However, there are a few rules we must obey.Ĭan be moved on another spot. The goal is to move all the disks from the first spot to the third spot so they are stacked in the same way as in the beginning. You start with the three spots (most often wooden sticks) and a certain number of disks (pieces) stacked on the first spot.Īll disks are in different sizes and stacked in a way that a smaller disk is on top of the larger. The name refers to a place from the legend, it’s said that the tower is in the capital city of Vietnam, Hanoi. The third and most popular name is the Tower of Hanoi.
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It’s also referred to as the Tower of Brahma because some believed that the temple from our legend is located in India and that monks are actually Brahmin priests. Sometimes it’s called Lucas’ Tower in honor of its inventor French mathematician Édouard Lucas, who invented it in 1883. This popular puzzle is known by a few different names.
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According to this legend, when the monks finish moving all the pieces, the world will end. The legend goes that there is a temple in Asia where the monks have been solving the Tower of Hanoi puzzle with 64 disks since the beginning of the time.
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