Tower of Hanoi
Background and Origin

Edward Lucas is the inventor of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle.

There is a myth that there is a very old Indian temple containing three posts and sixty-four golden-made disks.
The priests at that temple have to move these disks (the same way this puzzle works), and they've been doing so for the last few hundreds of years.
They think that when the last disk is moved, the world may come to an end.

Now how long does moving 64 disks take? As we mentioned on the main page, the minimum number of moves to solve the puzzle is 2^k - 1 given k is the number of disks.
This means this requires at least 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 moves!
The legend is funny enough because, even if the priests can move a disk every second, it would take them around 600 billion years to finish it.

Many versions of this legend exist as well.
One says that the temple is a monastery and the priests are monks. This monastery is seen to be found in many parts of the world with a main presence in Hanoi, Vietnam (thus the name).
Some other tweaks to this fiction are that the priests can only perform one move per day or that this puzzle was created when the world was created.

Too many stories and only one true fact: this puzzle is an awesome brain teaser. Enjoy your stay.