The SPIN-OUT Puzzl e Kirk Pruhs Computer Science Departmen t University of Pittsburg h Pittsburgh, PA 1526 0 kirkOcs .pitt .ed u 1 Introductio n Puzzles have proven to be good tools for teachin g principles of computer science . In particular, the towers of Hanoi puzzle (towers for short), and it man y variants (e .g . [2, 3]), are good tools for teaching recursion . Our purpose is to bring to the reader's attention another puzzle, SPIN-OUT, that the autho r has found to be a good tool for teaching recursio n as a problem solving tool . At first encounter students find that developing a recursive solution fo r SPIN-OUT seems significantly harder than solvin g the towers puzzle, as it requires strengthening the inductive hypothesis, strong induction, and solving a more difficult recurrence relation . However, in th e end they find that SPIN-OUT is merely the tower s puzzle incognito . The SPINY -OUT puzzle is essentially isomorphic to the Chinese rings puzzle . See , for example, [1] for a discussion of the Chinese ring s puzzle . However, the SPIN-OUT puzzle has severa l advantages as a teaching tool . It
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The SPIN-OUT puzzle
Pruhs, Kirk
Follow ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
, Volume 25 (3)
Association for Computing Machinery – Sep 1, 1993
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