Programming Praxis

While I was out of town last week, I ate dinner one evening at Cracker Barrel, which provides a triangle puzzle at each table so you can amuse yourself while you are waiting for your food. When my daughter challenged me to solve the problem, I failed, but I promised her that I would write a program to solve it.

As shown in the picture at right, the puzzle is a triangle with 15 holes and 14 pegs; one hole is initially vacant. The game is played by making 13 jumps; each jump removes one peg from the triangle, so at the end of 13 jumps there is one peg remaining. A jump takes a peg from a starting hole, over an occupied hole, to an empty finishing hole, removing the intermediate peg.

Your task is to write a program that solves the Cracker Barrel puzzle; find all possible solutions that start with a corner hole vacant and end with the remaining peg in the original vacant corner. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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