On Optimal Solutions for the Bottleneck Tower of Hanoi Problem

We study two aspects of a generalization of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. In 1981, D. Wood suggested its variant, where a bigger disk may be placed higher than a smaller one if their size difference is less than k. In 1992, D. Poole suggested a natural disk-moving strategy for this problem, but only in 2005, the authors proved it be optimal in the general case. We describe the family of all optimal solutions to this problem and present a closed formula for their number, as a function of the number of disks and k. Besides, we prove a tight bound for the diameter of the configuration graph of the problem suggested by Wood. Finally, we prove that the average length of shortest sequence of moves, over all pairs of initial and final configurations, is the same as the above diameter, up to a constant factor.