I once had a professor ask to solve the tower of hanoi using only 2 pegs.
How did that turn out?
It was a trick question.
Yeah of course but what did he expect to happen?
Realize it was impossible I guess?
Hm, okay. The word “professor” made me think that it may be something really interesting and not just “do this” — “not possible” — “yeah, you’re right”
And then someone starts talking about dining philosophers…
Oh god Hanoi’s towers… Incredible that I programmed it in BASIC on my ZX81 in the 80s, and now at 50+yo I would have no clue how to program it lol
I don’t get this meme. Can anyone explain what this meme means?
The meme basically shows how a non-programmer sees the Towers of Hanoi game as a fun little puzzle, while a programmer sees it as a traumatizing experience due to the recursive nature of the algorithm behind it
This is called Tower of Hanoi problem, usually introduced as main task when learning about recursion in programming
M-x hanoi
Good ol’ emacs, relevant xkcd (although I don’t think there’s anyone that hasn’t seen it).
