There are some poles, and on the first pole are some rings, each a different size. The sizes of the rings increases from the top to the bottom of the pole. The only allowable move is to take the top ring from any pole and place onto another pole. You cannot place a ring on top of another ring unless the other ring is exactly one size bigger. You can make as many moves as you like.

Your goal is to move all the rings onto the second pole, in the same order. What is the highest number of rings that can be moved when there are N poles? How can you move this many rings?

(In reply to No Subject by Jurgen)

Hmm. It's not that simple.

You need n poles to move n rings, but then you are in a situation where you have n-1 empty poles which allows you to move n-1 rings and so on. So really, if you have n free poles, you can move n + ... + 1 rings which is n(n+1)/2.

 

 

Posted by Jurgen on 2005-05-05 18:58:12