 | LLMs were asked to write a Python 3.10 client that plays a two-player adversarial variant of the Towers of Hanoi. Rules: Hero moves a disk; Villain must immediately move that same disk to an adjacent tower (or pass if no legal move). Hero's budget is 2^m + 1 moves — barely more than the 2^m - 1 solo optimum, so almost any wasted move loses. Round-robin tournament with penalty-shootout matchups: up to 5 rounds (+ sudden death), 2 simultaneous games per round with hero/villain roles swapped. Round configs grow from 4 towers / 3 disks up to 12 towers / 7 disks. [link] [comments] |
Gemini vs Grok: Playing Towers of Annoy
Reddit r/artificial / 4/24/2026
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Key Points
- Large language models were tasked with writing a Python client to play a two-player adversarial version of Towers of Hanoi, where the villain must immediately move the same disk to an adjacent tower.
- The contest design makes mistakes costly by giving the hero a move budget of 2^m + 1, only slightly above the solo optimum, so wasted moves typically lead to losses.
- Models competed in a round-robin tournament with head-to-head matchups that used multiple rounds (including sudden death) and ran two simultaneous games per round with swapped hero/villain roles.
- The challenge scaled in difficulty from 4 towers/3 disks up to 12 towers/7 disks, testing the models’ ability to handle increasingly complex adversarial planning.
- A detailed write-up reports that Gemini performed strongly (“aced” the challenge), including results across the tournament setup.
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