Daily Tower of Hanoi

DailyBrainArc already has a frozen six-game Daily rotation. Adding a new specialist should not silently change that contract for people who already use the main streak. Daily Tower of Hanoi therefore keeps its own history, streak and replay data. Solving or skipping it does not alter the Today’s 6 lineup.

The puzzle is deterministic for the local date. Reloading the page selects the same source, the same peg permutation and the same target. That makes a Daily result comparable with your own earlier attempt and prevents a refresh from shopping for an easier board.

Past and future product versions can add more Practice sources without rewriting the measured 2026 schedule. The release verifier checks every date in 2026 and confirms 365 deterministic, valid and distinct source-transform starts. That is a measured 2026 property rather than a promise that every possible future year must have the same distinct count.

The main quality signal is move efficiency. A par solve uses exactly the independently verified minimum number of moves from that day’s start state. If you finish above par, the result can show the extra moves without pretending a fast but wasteful route was optimal.

Elapsed time is still recorded locally because deliberate planning can become faster with practice. Clean bests prioritize fewer moves before time, so an optimal solution is not displaced merely because an assisted or longer route was clicked quickly.

The live monitor is useful before the result screen. It shows the source par, moves already made, optimal moves remaining and detour overhead. If moves plus remaining stays equal to par, you have not lost the possibility of an optimal finish. If it increases, the difference is the minimum extra cost of the route taken so far.

Check uses the exact distance table to report how many moves remain and whether a par finish is still possible. It does not move a disk, but it exposes solver information that you would not have in a completely unaided attempt, so the run becomes Assisted.

Verified Hint goes one step further. From the current board — including any detours you already made — it enumerates legal moves and applies one that reduces the exact remaining distance by one. It does not simply reveal the first move from a stored source solution.

Assisted solves still count as completed and remain visible in local history, but they do not overwrite a Clean best. This keeps the Daily useful both as a self-test and as a learning tool without hiding which result used solver support.

Current peg assignments, Undo/Redo history, move count, assistance state and elapsed time are saved in browser-local storage. If the page reloads during a Daily attempt, the game restores that state instead of generating a new puzzle or forcing a restart.

When today’s puzzle is solved, a local Daily record stores level, moves, par, time and Clean/Assisted status. The specialist streak advances only for the current date. A replay of an older local date may be useful for practice, but it does not fabricate a current-day streak.

No login, remote leaderboard or server puzzle feed is necessary for the core loop. The same frozen source bank and deterministic date mapping are inside the project package, which is important for predictable offline behavior and reproducible QA.

A full tower on one peg has a famous recursive structure, but repeating only that setup makes the puzzle increasingly about memorizing a procedure. Scrambled legal starts ask you to read the current board. You have to identify the exposed disks, understand which spare peg is useful, and choose a move that preserves future access.

Every assignment in the source bank is legal because disks on a peg are always stacked by size. The independent verifier then confirms that the target is reachable and measures the exact shortest distance. That lets a Daily start look unfamiliar without becoming arbitrary or unsolvable.

Four-peg days especially reward planning. Extra space creates more legal moves, but more legal choices also mean more opportunities to create a detour. The remaining-distance monitor makes that tradeoff visible rather than relying on vague difficulty labels.