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MultiTowers v1.6

• Description
• Screenshots
• Download
• Installation instructions
• A few notes of caution [please read!]
• Updates

MultiTowers (© H.Neth & S.J.Payne, 2001) is a collection of software modules to conduct psychological experiments involving the (in-)famous Towers of Hanoi and Tower of London problems. Constituting the drosophila of research on human problem solving, these tasks require a participant to transfer a number of disks from an initial state into a specified target configuration.

The program was written in Visual Basic 6 and should run on any recent MS Windows operating system. It's designed to allow for a wide range of tasks (numbers and types of disks, location and heigths of towers), procedural details (sequence of problems, solution vs. exploration mode, copy & paste of states, history function), and user interfaces (multiple windows, several mouse and/or syntax options).

A short paper using this program (and describing some of its more obscure functions) is:

Figure 1: Main menu to specify basic settings and select the problem type.

Figure 2: A typical 5-disk Towers of Hanoi problem.

Figure 3: Experimenters' panel for Towers of Hanoi problems (Click to see a larger version of this image).

Figure 4: A simple "Towers of Cardiff" problem (=Tower of London with additional constraints on pole heights).

Figure 5: A complex Tower of London problem (involving several identical disks).

Dowload the MS Windows version as a zipped archive [MultiTowers.zip, V1.6, 908KB].

This compiled version is suitable for test purposes, or as a neat (if somewhat 'uneventful') computer game. However, conducting your own experiments will inevitably require a number of adjustments, e.g., specifying the number and types of input problems, including instructions, pratice trials and other procedural details, as well as adding some code to collect the output data required to answer your specific research questions. If you've tried and liked the compiled version and would like to receive and adapt the Visual Basic source code just email me (MultiTowers AT neth.de) and I will send it to you.

Download the zipped archive and unzip it into an empty folder preserving the directory structure. (If your system cannot handle zip-files, get some software that can, e.g. WinZip). This should result into a main directory with three sub-folders (./Media, ./Input, and ./Output). Double-clicking on the executable file 'MultiTowers.exe' should run the program.

On rare occasions, users have encountered problems with the sound files. As these are non-essential (and make up about 50% of the required disk space) you can delete the subfolder './Media/Sounds' and switch off all sounds directly after starting the program.

• If you currently taking an introductory programming course and have to program the Towers of Hanoi problem as a class assignment, this program is not what you want. It's an instrumented tool for psychological experiments, not an efficient solution to the ToH problem (which, btw, is only about three lines long).
• As I'm still changing the program for my own experiments it is currently undocumented, but most options should be fairly self-explanatory if you just explore the menus. Some possible settings are taylored to meet specific experimental demands and might seem a bit idiosyncratic. However, these can be ignored without loss of basic functionality.
• Also, since I'm not a 'real' programmer and have had to make many major rearrangements as well as minor refinements, the present code is pretty messy and far from pure or beautiful. The program was designed to be functional in allowing to run psychological experiments — not to be elegant or efficient.
• Finally, I'd be surprised if MultiTowers could possibly damage your soft- or hardware, or even harm your brainware in any way. Nonetheless, I'll assume no responsibility or guarantees whatsoever.

Please feel free to email <MultiTowers AT neth.de> if you have any further questions, suggestions towards possible improvements, or even an interest in the research questions behind the program.

Updates:

• [01|03|2002]: A much improved version 2.0 exists, but as I'm still using and changing it, I won't put it online just yet. Please contact me if you would like to receive the latest version.
• [01|2004]: I'm not using VB any more, so please don't ask me for updates or revisions. However, the program is still available and ought to be adaptable to your specific needs.