108 Ways To Do The Towers of Hanoi

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 :)"

Next up: 108 ways to post the same story on /.

[corebreech]

nt

Isn't there a legend involved?

[91degrees]

When someone works out every single way to solve the problem, the towers will crumble to dust and the world will vanish

Re:Reverse DOS?

[Crypto Gnome]

Yea Yeah Yeah, I know the TOS field isn't big enough to show 128.

It's a joke, so laugh.

My addition

[kinnell]

Here it is coded in Whitespace [dur.ac.uk]:

But what about...

[Mr. Mosty-Toasty]

...Brainfuck [muppetlabs.com]?

pfff ... Big deal ...

[cablepokerface]

Converting the Towers of Hanoi syntax into 108 different languages?

Visual Studio.NET includes a standard wizard for that.

What? No Intercal?

[dm(Hannu)]

No language comparison is complete without Intercal [catb.org].

Re:Whitespace?

[FrostedWheat]

Maybe they did, but you just didn't see it?

yeah...

[AbbyNormal]

to the joy of millions of 1st year Computer Science students.

Re:yeah...

[cdrudge]

And much to the chagrin of thousands of CS profs.

Re:what if he had spent his time on something usef

[johannesg]

...he said in a posting on slashdot.

Re:Whitespace?

[ObviousGuy]

I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition and have encoded it here in Whitespace.

Re:My addition

[ShootThemLater]

Hmmm, looks like slashcode's added a couple of extra whitespaces in there. Won't compile.

Re:What is the most disks you have solved for?

[fbform]

Eight here too. In fact when I first heard of the problem (when I was 10 I think), it specified 8 disks. Never occurred to me to solve for a smaller problem first. It took me some 14 months to find a solution for the 8-disk problem by myself. Man, those were the days! I used playing cards instead of disks, and everybody around me thought I was playing some weird form of Solitaire. Sigh.
Yes, I'm still single. Why do you ask?

Re:What is the most disks you have solved for?

[jtdubs]

10 here. i wrote a computer program to draw a sexy 3d version of it and let me move pieces by tapping the 1, 2 and 3 keys. after solving 4 or 5 discs a few times my fingers would get into this wierd zone where they'd just fly over those three keys without any conscious thought. very cool.

justin

I'm surprised no one has suggested...

[EvilLile]

Malbolge. Who ever said programming was supposed to be easy or fun?

Malbolge, Programming From Hell [mines.edu]

When I read the title..

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought of 108 Ways To Do The Girls of Hanoi.

Much more, uh, arousing.

Well, you know waht they say...

[David Gould]

I wanted to ask "why"

Never ask a geek "why". Just nod slowly as you back away.

towers implemented as a Slashdot thread

[Anonymous Coward]

``=I=`` I I
`==I==` I I
===I=== I I

Your move.

(You wouldn't believe how long it took to get this to display correctly and get past the lameness filter)