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 is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I am glad of this war. It kicks the pasteboard bottom in of the usual “good” popular novel. People have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)