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.
Read more about this topic: Tower Of Hanoi
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.”
—Auguste Rodin (1849–1917)
“It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)