General Assembly Logo

Hanoi Tower

The Tower of Hanoi (also called the Tower of Brahma or Lucas' Tower, and sometimes pluralized) is a mathematical game or puzzle. It consists of three rods, and a number of disks of different sizes which can slide onto any rod. The puzzle starts with the disks in a neat stack in ascending order of size on one rod, the smallest at the top, thus making a conical shape.

The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod, obeying the following simple rules:

  • Only one disk can be moved at a time.
  • Each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the stacks and placing it on top of another stack i.e. a disk can only be moved if it is the uppermost disk on a stack.
  • No disk may be placed on top of a smaller disk.

With three disks, the puzzle can be solved in seven moves. The minimum number of moves required to solve a Tower of Hanoi puzzle is 2n - 1, where n is the number of disks.

Learn about the Tower of Hanoi here.

The Tower of Hanoi is a

Objectives

      |         |         |
               |         |
     ———        |         |
    —————       |         |
———————————————————————————————
    tower1    tower2    tower3
  • Try to move all the disks from TOWER 1 to TOWER 3.
  • You may only move one disk at a time.
  • You must never allow a bigger disk to go on top of a smaller disk.

Instructions

Write code to make the tests pass. Above is a visual example of the hanoi tower problem.