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On the expansion of Hanoi graphs

Published: October 20, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.18010v1

By: David Eppstein, Daniel Frishberg, William Maxwell

Potential Business Impact:

Makes Tower of Hanoi puzzle easier to solve.

Business Areas:
Table Tennis Sports

The famous Tower of Hanoi puzzle involves moving $n$ discs of distinct sizes from one of $p\geq 3$ pegs (traditionally $p=3$) to another of the pegs, subject to the constraints that only one disc may be moved at a time, and no disc can ever be placed on a disc smaller than itself. Much is known about the Hanoi graph $H_p^n$, whose $p^n$ vertices represent the configurations of the puzzle, and whose edges represent the pairs of configurations separated by a single legal move. In a previous paper, the present authors presented nearly tight asymptotic bounds of $O((p-2)^n)$ and $\Omega(n^{(1-p)/2}(p-2)^n)$ on the treewidth of this graph for fixed $p \geq 3$. In this paper we show that the upper bound is tight, by giving a matching lower bound of $\Omega((p-2)^n)$ for the expansion of $H_p^n$.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ United States

Page Count
17 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Combinatorics