Each disc was hand crafted out of precious stones. The gods would play games with these discs. They would challenge each other to move all the discs from one tower to another.”

“It may sound simple,” he continued, noticing my bemused expression, “but there was a requirement. The discs are all of different sizes. And no disc may rest upon any disc that is smaller in size than itself.

So the challenge became getting the discs from one tower to another with the third used for temporary storage. It is rumoured that the entrance of service can only be opened by a magic number – the number being the most optimal of moves required to move these ten discs like so. No more.”

“Our people have played this game. Yet, we cannot find a number low enough. No matter how hard we try we do not succeed. Periodically a newcomer will better the last score and we attempt the entrance but with no success. We think the legend is purely a story to entertain children.”

“What is the best score so far?” I asked.

“4096,” my captor stated.

Well, I thought, I could either dig rocks or I could make an attempt to break this code. Given my disposition towards getting my hands dirty the answer seemed obvious. Yet, I knew I could not work out this problem by myself. I sat and fired up my ASUS Eee that I had fortunately brought along. Within mere seconds its SSD-powered body flickered into life.

I logged in and pressed CTRL-ALT-T. I was going to need the command line for this. And as fortune would have it, I remembered reading of such a problem not long ago. That’s right! It was the classic Towers of Hanoi problem, often a favoured example when teaching the concept of recursion in programming classes.

And lo and behold, I had saved a BASH script to perform such calculations. Why thank you, those who make source code available to the public.

Am I on the right track? Will I be released? Allow me to tell you more of my strange tale.

CONTINUED