Combinatorics and Graph theory are related areas of math.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
5 points (100.0% liked)
A place for everything about math
881 readers
2 users here now
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Hmm, it's hard to say exactly, since I'm not familiar with the phone game and don't really have time to go through your explanation of it carefully.
But, it looks to me like this problem is probably in the realm of combinatorics or graph theory.
Again, it's hard to say without a bit more care and thought on my end, but you could check out graph theory, because it's actually just super cool generally. Lot of neat results, lot of applications to places you wouldn't expect, cool stuff!
this might be a variant of Towers of Hanoi, and the method for solving these is recursion + tree searching
Key to the Tower of Hanoi - Numberphile