Daniel Berend

Many questions regarding the Tower of Hanoi problem have been posed and answered during the years. Variants of the classical puzzle, such as allowing more than 3 pegs, and imposing limitations on the possible moves among the pegs, raised the analogous questions for those variants. One such question is: given a variant, and a certain number of disks, find a pair of disk arrangements such that the minimal number of moves required for changing from the first to the second is maximal over all pairs. One of the main results of the paper is identifying these for the Cyclic_h variants - the variants with h pegs arranged along a uni-directional circle - to be the pairs of perfect configurations where the destination peg is right before the source peg.