Popular Culture
In today’s pop culture, the Tower of Hanoi is used in many films, video games, novels and television shows. In the film, Rise of the Planet Apes released in 2011, the Tower of Hanoi, called “Lucas Tower” in the film (after the sequence’s inventor), is used to study and examine the intelligence of apes. In the video game, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box released in 2007, the discs in the Tower of Hanoi were changed to pancakes (this can be a stimulant for completing the game in a shorter amount of time-if you eat the pancakes after). The puzzle in the video game is based around a scenario where the chef of a restaurant has the task of moving piles of pancakes from one plate to another while following the basic guidelines of the Tower of Hanoi. For example, players could not place a larger pancake on a smaller one. In the science fiction novel, Now Inhale by Eric Frank Russell, the main character is a prisoner on a planet where the local custom is to play a game until it is won or lost. The character chooses to play the Tower of Hanoi in order to rescue a lost ship, making reference to the legend of the Tower of Hanoi. In a 2001 episode of the television series Survivor, Ozzy Lusth and Benjamin “Coach” Wade attempted to solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and had trouble understanding its concept (wiki). Overall, the Tower of Hanoi is a game/ puzzle still recognized by various cultures and its legend and complexity still lives on today in deeper ways than just studying the mathematical sequences.