Towers Of Hanoi Development Blog

Overview

I originally was given the idea for this application during a CS 2800-Discrete Structures lecture in the fall of 2023. Our professor suggested that a student in the class program a Towers of Hanoi simulator that would showcase it's recursive solution. At the time I thought this would be very cool, but I was intimidated as it was only my second semester in the CS program and I was swamped in coursework. After putting it off for months, I decided to make the application during my winter break.

Marking my first personal project, this one is special to me. I felt so much pride when I finished it and had a real application I could show off to anyone who was interested. I am also excited to be sharing it here- on my blog.

Design Challenges

Taking this initiative and starting this project from scratch was a big step for me. With minimal knowlege of program structure and no experience with git, I embarked on this jouney naked and afraid.

I quickly got the hang of things, and while I didn't start using version control until much later- the files survived long enough to make it onto my GitHub after the fact.

Concurrency

During the original development of this sim, I ran into race conditions frequently. My understanding of concurrency was primitive, and my GUI was reading the gamestate before the backend finished updating it. The program would still run, but many bright red error messages would appear in the terminal.

I came back to it much later and solved these issues. Where it sits today, I am satisfied to call it complete.

Development Resources

• Java API
• This Article

GitHub Repository

• sjbar03/Towers-of-Hanoi