Figuring Things Out On My Own

I am not a mathematician. I’ve taken upper division level math courses in college, but that’s where it ends. I’m even less qualified in the area of computer software technology. But I am a human being with a brain that seems to be functioning enough to get myself through each day as it comes. And that means I can delve into areas that I know for a fact others probably would think of as “easy” or “trivial”. Logic puzzle games such as sudoku, kakuro, and hidato are examples, as are the more traditional word-based logic problems. But there are other games as well.

Each time my family and I go to a Cracker Barrel restaurant, we find at our table a peg game. The block consists of an equilateral triangle of peg holes, five on each side, fifteen holes in all. There are fourteen pegs in holes, leaving an empty hole (which at the start can be anywhere on the board the player wishes). The game begins this way. The object of the game is to have only one peg left on the board when all possible moves have ended. A move consists only of a peg jumping directly over another into an empty hole. The peg jumped over is then removed. So, ideally, a (winning) game will take thirteen moves. Usually though, it’s much shorter than that, with three or four pegs still there when the moves are exhausted.

I wondered if I could develop a procedure that would guide my moves toward victory in this peg game. Naturally, my thoughts veered to the Internet, and I wondered whether or not someone else had figured this out. I did a search and came up with a site in which someone who had written a program of all possible moves had come up with all of the possible winning games. After seeing this, I decided to go no further with the Web and instead decided to tackle this on my own. After all, where’s the fun of doing a puzzle if someone else is giving you the answer? On the other hand, sometimes when I am trying to figure things out (like this peg game), I feel like the anthropoid ape in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey who is sitting around a pile of bones and figuring out how to use them as tools. Maybe I should be playing Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra while performing this task!