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Dear Sean,
some fellow researchers are currently shopping for some experiment software and asked me to help them in finding the right product for their planned research. In many aspects, I'd like to recommend them to go with Inquisit. But there's one thing I'm not perfectly sure about. Their studies will have to contain some classic problem-solving tasks, specifically the "Tower of Hanoi" problem. So here's my question: Do you think this task can be implemented with Inquisit 3?

As always, thanks a lot for your help!
~Dave

Hi Dave,

In my opinion, you could implement Tower of Hanoi in Inquisit.
Without thinking through it in too much detail, I would save the state of the tower in user defined variables. Each trial could read this information to generate the position of the shapes. You could use shapes to represent the tiles on the respective columns. You could use two trials to select a tile to be moved. I think this would work.

With the version 3 programming features, I have found that you can do a wide range of things. The resulting code is not always the prettiest, but it works.

Cheers,

Jeromy

Hi Jeromy,

thanks very much for your take on this. I also suspect, that it could be done using userdefined variables and a whole lot of expressions. The problem is: I'm not 100% sure and I don't have the extra time right now to program it just for the fun of it (as I said, it's not relevant to any of my research projects). So, if any others who have done similarly complex tasks in Inquisit 3 want to chime in and give their opinion, I'd be happy to hear it!

~Dave

I also think it can be done, though I can't say that with 100% certainty. I'm not sure what your timeframe is, but if I can find some free time in the next few days, I might take a crack at it.  

I can think of a few different approaches. The most straightforward one would be create the pieces as stimuli, and use position and size properties to evaluate whether a given move is fair.  

-Sean

Thanks for your expert opinion, Sean! The timeframe is rather loose, i.e. it's not very urgent (as far as I know). Of course, I'd love to see your approach - so if you can indeed spare the time to give it a shot, I'd be your biggest fan!

~Dave

Dear all,

does anyone have any more insights regarding this topic? I'll be happy about every opinion and suggestion posted!

Sincerely,
~Dave