Skip to Main Content| Colorblind Mode:OnOff

Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Thinking

Critical Thinking Activities

fiogf49gjkf0d
fiogf49gjkf0d

Problem Solving: The Tower of Hanoi Puzzle

How do we solve complex problems? In this chapter you learned that while some problems can be solved by a sudden flash of insight, finding an appropriate solution more often involves negotiating a series of sequential steps, such as those required to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem below.

Towers of Hanoi Puzzle

The task is deceptively simple: move all of the disks from the leftmost to the rightmost peg. You may only move one disk at a time and you may not place a larger disk on top of a smaller disk. How many moves did it take you to solve the problem?

Psychological scientists are interested in this problem because its well-defined rules make it easy to study how people approach the task and arrive at a solution. And while this three-disk task is relatively simple (with practice you should be able to solve it in seven moves), adding more disks makes the problem significantly more challenging. For instance, solving a 64-disk version of the Tower of Hanoi problem would require 264 -1 seconds, if you moved disks at a rate of about one per second. In other words, you'd be done in 600,000,000,000 years.
1.
fiogf49gjkf0d
fiogf49gjkf0d
Information-processing approaches have been likened to computer programming, in which inputs are transformed into outputs through a series of explicit operations. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this analogy?
2.
fiogf49gjkf0d
fiogf49gjkf0d
Why would patients with frontal lobe damage have serious difficulties solving the Tower of Hanoi problem?

Submit to Gradebook:

First Name:
 
Last Name:
 
Your Email Address:
 
Your Professor's Email Address:
 

Print This Page
Bookmark and Share

The Norton Gradebook

Instructors and students now have an easy way to track online quiz scores with the Norton Gradebook.

Go to the Norton Gradebook

Norton Ebooks

The ebook version Psychology, 8e offers the full content of the print version at half the price.

Norton Ebooks