Recursive aspect of the Tower of Hanoi problem.

Question

Right now I am a CS student in high school. I am going ahead of the class and my teacher recommended that I learn recrusion for Java.
Can somebody provide a trace or a link to a trace for this. I have been spending the last two days trying to understand the recursion aspect of this problem and I am stuck.
I tried to use: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cburch/survey/recurse/hanoiex.html but it didn't help
Or if somebody could just notate the part of the code so I would be able to understand it. I understand basic recursion, but I am exploring stuff that is in the same chapter such as the tower problem and Recursive Premutation (I have no idea how that works).
Here is the code my textbook provided:
private void moveTower (int numDisks, int start, int end, int temp)
          if (numDisks == 1)
               moveOneDisk (start,end);
          else
               moveTower(numDisks-1, start, temp, end);
               moveOneDisk (start, end);
               moveTower(numDisks-1, temp, end, start);
Thanks for your time.
Edit: (forgot the moveOneDisk method)
private void moveOneDisk (int start, int end)
          System.out.println("Move one disk from " + start + " to " + end);
          count++; //Seperate variable to keep track of the nubmer of moves
     }

Answer 1

First of all, I love the towers of hanoi problem... I still think its so cool.
So you start off with a number of pegs on one spindle
x
x
x
x
A  B  CAnd you want to more the blocks from A to C.
The steps are:
1. move the n-1 blocks from A to B,
2. move the bottom block from A to C
3. move n-1 blocks from B to C
But, you should see that in doing steps 1 and 3, you are doing the towers of hanoi problem for a smaller tower, which makes it recursive.
So you need a base case - moving one block. Then you need to write a recursive function that does the steps I've laid out.
Good luck!