Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Puzzling

Walking through Barnes and Noble, Little Guy saw a box that caught his eye. It was called the Logic Box like the one you see below. In it was the Tower of Hanoi puzzle which includes a block of wood with three pegs and some discs.





The Tower of Hanoi puzzle is a mathematical puzzle. The puzzle starts with the disks neatly stacked in order of size on one rod, the smallest at the top. The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack from one rod to another rod. However, only one disc can be moved at a time, you can only take "top" discs, and no disc may be placed on a smaller disc.

The box said that the puzzle was so hard that it would "drive you crazy". When we got home to read the directions we found out that the puzzle was used in a lot of computer science classes to teach algorithms.

Hubs picked it up and started playing around with it. After a few minutes, Little Guy said, "I know exactly how to solve it. I can see the solution."

We put the puzzle back together from the start and sure enough, he did see the answer. He had completely solved the puzzle in about 15 minutes.

Give the puzzle a try: Here is an Online Version

(FYI... He does the nine disc version!)

3 comments:

Dr. Wifey said...

geezy creezy! i did the 3 disc version online and thought, if he can do 9 i'll do 9! when it showed it would take 511 moves, i decided i'll just pretend i can do it :) LOL you've got some smart boys!

HEATHER said...

That is so cool! I will have to look for one of these.

Wyatt Earp said...

That boy is one smart kid. I suspect they both are. I would still be trying to figure that out.