Pancakes, Puzzles, and Polynomials: Cracking the Cracker Barrel

Christopher Frost, Michael Peck, David Evans.
ACM SIGACT News, March 2004.

Abstract
The Cracker Barrel peg game is a simple, one-player game commonly found on tables at pancake restaurants. In this paper, we consider the computational complexity of the Cracker Barrel problem. We show that a variation of a generalization of the problem is NP-complete.

Leave only one — you're genius,
. . . Leave four or more'n you're just plain "eg-no-ra-moose"".
Cracker Barrel peg game instructions

Complete Paper (4 pages) [PDF]
Project Web Page