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The Towers of Hanoi and Adventures in Mathematics
(page 10(2))


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What is the Towers of Hanoi Puzzle
The Towers of Hanoi puzzle consists of three needles or posts, the first of which has a stack of rings of different sizes, as in:

The objective is to move the stack, one ring at a time to another of the needles, but you may not place a larger ring on top of a smaller ring.

There are lots of web sites that allow you to solve the Towers of Hanoi, but the easiest I've found is: Virtual Manipulative: Towers of Hanoi, but read the instructions below first.

I suggest that you start off with a tower of size 4, or even 3. Once you have linked to the web site, you can select the size of the tower using the arrow keys in the bottom right hand side of the picture.

To solve the puzzle on the site, point at the ring you want to move with the mouse, press down on mouse-button-1 and drag the ring to the post on which you want to place the ring and release the button.

Click here when you are ready to play.

If you cannot reach the site or it doesn't work for you you can play using coins and three circles drawn on a piece of paper. If you're in Canada using a twoonie, a loonie, a quarter, and a nickel works really well.

If you don't have $3.30 Canadian, you could use four different sized sauce pan lids, plates, cut out paper circles, or a younger sibling's stacking toys.

Once you figure out how to solve the puzzle, try counting the number of moves it takes you.

If you can't figure the puzzle out, I'll help on the next page.


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