Psychological Science, 2 ed.

Chapter 8: Thinking and Intelligence

Activities

• Reduce Text Size (css supported browser only)
• Enlarge Text (css supported browser only)
• Email this Page to a Friend
• Print this Page

Problem-Solving: The Tower of Hanoi Puzzle

This activity includes: - Introduction - Tower of Hanoi Puzzle - Discussion Questions

How do we solve complex problems? In Chapter 8 you learned that while some problems can be solved by a sudden flash of insight, finding an appropriate solution more often involves negotiating a series of sequential steps, such as those required to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem below.

>>Towers of Hanoi Puzzle

The task is deceptively simple: move all of the disks from the leftmost to the rightmost peg. You may only move one disk at a time and you may not place a larger disk on top of a smaller disk. How many moves did it take you to solve the problem?
Psychological scientists are interested in this problem because its well-defined rules make it easy to study how people approach the task and arrive at a solution. And while this three-disk task is relatively simple (with practice you should be able to solve it in seven moves), adding more disks makes the problem significantly more challenging. For instance, solving a sixty-four-disk version of the Tower of Hanoi problem would require 264 -1 moves! In other words, if you moved disks at a rate of about one per second, you'd be done in 600,000,000,000 years.

Discussion Questions:

1. Information processing approaches have been likened to computer programming, in which inputs are transformed into outputs through a series of explicit operations. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this analogy?
   
   
   
2. Why would frontal lobe patients have serious difficulties solving the Tower of Hanoi problem?
   
   

Name:
Email:
Professor Email: