Deriving Simpler Output Data

The Standard Solution as presented fully describes the disk stacking situation at every step. But if one were working with actual Hanoi Towers, or a suitable representation of each situation independently, the explicit description of each stacking situation would be unnecessary and undesirable if one actually wanted to work with the independent representations of stacking situations. How to abbreviate the explantion of transitions between the successive stacking situation depends on the basic operation one wants to perform. Perhaps the most natural way, say when one has direct visual access to Hanoi Towers, is to simply represent each move by a pair of peg names, indicating the source and destination peg for each move. Thus, the procedure would produce a sequence of peg pairs as output rather than a sequence of stacking descriptions.

An alternative to peg pairs as output data would be pairs of disks with pegs, indicating which disk to move to which peg. This data presentation of moves would make sense if it was easier to identify a disk rather than a peg, for example if one could make a disk and a peg light up in a physical Hanoi Tower kit.

Further analysis of Hanoi Sequences and suitable move specifications will lead to Deriving an Iterative Method. IF YOU CAN SEE THIS go to /sfa/Nuprl/Shared/Xindentation_hack_doc.html