Keywords: Towers, Hanoi, Brahma, Lucas', recursive, algorithm, solve, demonstrate

This is not an interactive game for you to play but rather a demonstration of how to solve this classic puzzle. The time estimate is very rough and only intended to give you an idea of how many years it might take for a computer to solve various numbers of disks.

As I remember the story, monks were to move 64 disks from the start peg to the destination peg by moving only one disk at a time and never placing a larger disk on top of a smaller disk. When they completed the task, the world was supposed to come to an end. It should be noted that if they could move one disk in one second (which would be pretty hard to do) it would take about 500 billion years. With this program using a 1.6 gigahertz processor I could finish the puzzle in about 50 million years. Less time for the world, but chances are my power supply would burn up before then...whew!

If you click your left or right mouse button and drag up, down, left, or right you can change the sizes of the disks.