Solving the Tower of Hanoi with Random Moves

Abstract

We prove the exact formulae for the expected number of moves to solve several variants of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle with 3 pegs and n disks, when each move is chosen uniformly randomly from the set of all valid moves. We further present an alternative proof for one of the formulae that couples a theorem about expected commute times of random walks on graphs with the delta-to-wye transformation used in the analysis of three-phase AC systems for electrical power distribution.