Extra! Scroll down to read about the fascinating history of this game.

Too easy? Then increase the number of disks up to eight! A perfect score is 255 moves. Can you do that?

 

 

ABOUT THE GAME…

 

     Edouard Lucas invented the Tower of Hanoi, which is also referred to as the Tower of Brahma or the End of the World Puzzle. As the story goes, professor Lucas, a French mathematician, “was intrigued by the legend of a Hindu temple where the pyramid puzzle might have been used for the mental discipline of young priests. Legend says that at the beginning of time the priests in the temple were given a stack of 64 gold disks, each one a little smaller than the one beneath it. Their assignment was to transfer the 64 disks from one of the three poles to another, with one important provision a large disk could never be placed on top of a smaller one. The priests worked very efficiently, day and night. When they finished their work, the myth said, the temple would crumble into dust and the world would vanish” (http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/Java/Tower/towerhistory.html).

     According to the University of California at Berkeley, “the number of separate transfers of single disks the priests must make to transfer the tower is 2 to the 64th minus 1, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 moves! If the priests worked day and night, making one move every second it would take slightly more than 580 billion years to accomplish the job” (http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/Java/Tower/towerhistory.html)!

Fortunately the game posted here has a lot less than 64 disks!

 

Reference: http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/Java/Tower/towerhistory.html

The object of the game is to move the disks to the third pole or opposite side in the same order as in the beginning. No large disks may be moved on top of a smaller disk. Notice the game can be played with up to 8 disks!