Tower of Hanoi - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

In the science fiction story "Now Inhale", by Eric Frank Russell, the human is a prisoner on a planet where the local custom is to make the prisoner play a game until it is won or lost, and then execution is immediate. The hero knows a rescue ship might take a year or more to arrive, so chooses to play Towers of Hanoi with 64 disks. This story makes reference to the legend about the Buddhist monks playing the game until the end of the world.)

In the 1966 Doctor Who story The Celestial Toymaker, the eponymous villain forces the Doctor to play a ten-piece 1023-move Tower of Hanoi game entitled The Trilogic Game with the pieces forming a pyramid shape when stacked.

In the 2011 film Rise of the Planet of the Apes the puzzle, named in the film as the "Lucas Tower", is used as a test to study the intelligence of apes.

The puzzle is featured regularly in adventure and puzzle games. Since it is easy to implement, and easily recognised, it is well-suited to use as a puzzle in a larger graphical game (e.g. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect). Some implementations use straight disks, but others disguise the puzzle in some other form. There is an arcade version by Sega/Andamiro.

The problem is featured as part of a reward challenge in a 2011 episode of the American version of the Survivor TV series. Both players (Ozzy Lusth and Benjamin "Coach" Wade) struggle to understand how to solve the puzzle and are aided by their fellow tribe members.