Today I post on maths, and games, and a puzzle. In 1883 the brilliant mathematician Édouard Lucas brought a logic game to Western audiences in 1883 he called “the Tower of Hanoi.” Cottoning onto the Orientalism that made Asia and Asia Minor seem exotic and fascinating to Westerners, he marketed it as a kids’ puzzle. You can see the original 1883 box in the first slide — the game referred to Lucas and his book, _Récreations Mathématiques_.
The game is still popular today (see third photo), and goes like this — you want to get all the pieces from one peg to another, but you can only move one disk at a time. Also, you cannot put a larger disk on top of another. How few moves are necessary to complete the puzzle? With only three disks, you need at least seven moves.
Lucas claimed the puzzle stemmed from a legend in India about the temple in Benares called Kashi Vishwanath (photo two), which received a Tower of Brahma that had 64 disks arranged in increasing size on one of three spires. In Lucas’ rendition of the story, the temple priests have been moving these disks and playing this puzzle for centuries and centuries, and when the final disk is transferred, it will be the end of the universe.
Lucas knew that, by the terms of this legend, the universe was safe. And that’s because there is a mathematical formula to determine the minimum number of moves: 2 to the power of n-1 (n is the number of disks). Using this formula at a rate of one disk per second, you would take almost 585 billion years to bring about the End of Time (about 40 times the current age of the universe).
This game has shown up in popular culture — in a 1966 _Dr Who_ episode and in the 2011 _Rise of the Planet of the Apes_.
Source: https://www.vanishingincmagic.com/puzzles-and-brainteasers/articles/history-of-tower-of-hanoi-problem/ https://dmpc.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/The-Legend-of-the-Golden-Disks.pdf https://www.puzzlemuseum.com/month/picm07/2007-03_hanoi.htm https://simanaitissays.com/tag/the-tower-of-hanoi/
