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Towers of Hanoi
As puzzles go, nobody really did it better than the monks who came up with the one we are going to learn about, the Towers of Hanoi. Besides being a really cool puzzle, it has a lot of practical (and historical!) significance as we learn about recursion.
Onward!
How Towers of Hanoi Is Played
Before we get to the programming side of things, let’s first get a good idea of what the monks were trying to do. The objective of this puzzle is pretty simple. You have a series of disks and three pillars (Figure 16-1).
FIGURE 16-1
The start of our puzzle
At the beginning, all of the disks are stacked on top of each other and start ...
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