Item:
“I heard about this Towers of Hanoi puzzle that supposedly will only be solved by several Buddhist monks, which will result in the the universe ending. These monks were the alleged keepers of three towers. There were 64 rings stacked on one tower, in order of increasing size from bottom to the top. The monks needed to move the rings, one at a time, from the first tower to the third tower; however, the major caveat was that they could not place a larger ring on top of a smaller ring. Finally, after all the 64 rings had been rearranged, the world would come to an end.”
General Information about Item:
- Oral folklore: eschatological myth
- English
- USA
Informant Data:
Shaket Chaudhary is a Dartmouth computer science major in the class of 2019 from Omaha, Nebraska.
Contextual Data:
The interviewee first heard about this myth from his professor in his CS1 class during 15W.
Transcript of Associated File:
Informant’s Comments:
Basically, it’s a puzzle that takes a really long time to compute by hand. Thus, the significance of this myth is to demonstrate how important and helpful computers can be in our modern age since they can make accomplishing tasks much quicker for us.
Collector’s Comments:
This can be classified as an eschatological myth since it provides a reasoning for the end of the world.
Tags/Keywords:
myth, programming, towers of hanoi