108 Ways To Do The Towers of Hanoi 192
hlarwood74 writes "While it is common to program in a few different languages, somebody has written "towers of hanoi" in 108 different ways, most of them in different programming languages. It's not just the number of languages though ... there are many neat implementations and in some cases he's come up with some strange ways of solving hanoi such as this: "you ping the hanoi machine with the number of disks encoded in the type of service field, and you get response packets whose sequence numbers represent the disk moves need to solve the puzzle". I wanted to ask "why" but the title of the page (hanoimania) explains a few things :)"
Reminds me of... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Hello World page.
The difference? The examples on the Hello World page all have source code. Hanoimania... Not so.
But.... solving the Towers of Hanoi shows a lot more of the programming environment than Hello World does... Conditionals, branching, recursion, function calls...
Re:what if he had spent his time on something usef (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, while this has gone to an extream, a many developers have a pet progam they implement anytime they run across a new language/platform. This give the programmer a familiar program to implement in an unfamiliar environment. A great way to get your feet wet with something new. Whenever I start working with a new language or on a new platform, I have a game I implement that covers many of the basic program constructs. By the time I have finished the game I have a good enough working knowledge of teh new language and/or platform to begin some real work.
Here is the same basic explination from the web page (I am assuming it will get slashdotted soon):
I am often asked that since I do all this, whether I have a lot of free time on my hands. Between my work and my interests (both of which overlap to a great extent), I actually have no free time. As an aside, I would not (and should not) be expected to "know" so many programming languages, and I don't think I do! However, I do believe that knowing a computer language is a rather fuzzy idea. If one could write a useful (loosely speaking, again) program in a given language, it is instructive to question whether one knows it. It is ironical (yes, there is such a word) that the bigger challenge, at least in my opinion, lies not in writing programs in all these different languages and ways, but in rapidly setting up the respective compiler systems and/or development environments on an appropriate platform/operating system. Sometimes compilers, interpreters and other such software for a particular language may be readily available, and run "out of the box", but many times this is not the case. Sometimes it turns out to be a non-trivial problem to get a compiler to function (pun unintended). Of course, once you get past this, you do have to understand some subset of the language!
Haskell? (Score:4, Insightful)
Neat idea, I like to see how things are done in other languages. It would be an interesting and intuitive way to show people what other languages are like, a list of programs the same in each language, plus commentary about the highlights of the language that are used.
Re:Isn't there a legend involved? (Score:5, Insightful)
He then goes on to generalize the algorithm to support n-dimensional stacks.
Very easy non-recursive solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine the disk are in a cricle. Repeat:
- move the smallest disk one step clockwise
- do the only legal move not involving the smallest disk
Much easier to remember and perform by hand than the various iterative C programs posted. The proof that it works is left as an exercise to the reader...