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#recursion
2 reviews · 4 essays
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Tower of Hanoi (1883) — The 64 Disks That Never End, and the Legacy of Recursion
In 1883 the French mathematician Édouard Lucas released a small wooden toy under the pseudonym 'N. Claus (de Siam).' Three pegs, disks of differing size, and just two rules. Yet beneath that plain surface lay the mathematics of recursion: moving n disks demands a minimum of 2^n−1 moves. This essay revisits the toy's true origin, the fabricated Benares legend in which the world ends when 64 disks are moved, and what the ideas of 'recursion' and 'state space' bequeathed to later computer science and to puzzle design today.
Recursion as a Puzzle Grammar — The Nested Logic of Patrick's Parabox and Recursed
A box inside a box, and inside it the same board again. From Recursed to Patrick's Parabox and Cocoon, a reading of nested-puzzle design and why recursion runs so deep.
Inside Patrick Traynor's Philosophy — Designing by Discovery, Not Invention
A study of Patrick Traynor, sole creator of Patrick's Parabox, drawn from his interviews and his 2024 GDC talk. He calls recursion 'a corner of truth of the universe' and casts himself as a discoverer rather than an inventor; we read his pursuit of approachability, his publicly told failures around difficulty curves and rules, and the ethics of a discoverer.
Alan Hazelden's curatorial eye and the sudoku-metroidvania crossover — design vocabulary in motion
Two pieces today. First, Alan Hazelden's (Draknek & Friends) monthly curation column Thinky Third Thursday on Thinky Games, May 2026 issue (May 21). Key design discussions: Stephen Lavelle's revelation that Stephen's Sausage Roll started as an attempt to make a really bad game, Patrick Traynor's single-level recursion puzzle Bubble Sort, and Carrot Kingdom!'s design of mechanics the player had all along. Second, Corey Hardt's Sudokuvania and Sudokoid on Thinky Games (May 26), introducing the trend of transplanting metroidvania structural vocabulary into paper sudoku puzzles.
Related reviews
Maquette
A first-person recursive puzzle set in a world nested inside itself: the model at its center is the very world you stand in, so shrinking or enlarging objects ripples across scales — all wrapped in a love story.
perspective-puzzlenarrative-puzzlerecursionRecursed
A 2D puzzle that translates recursion into a tiny pixel-art room. The grandfather of Patrick's Parabox.
puzzleplatformerrecursive
