Knight's Tour

Knight’s Tour

Kelum Senanayake

Outline
 What is „Knight‟s Tour
 Theory
 Knight's graph
 Computer Algorithms
 Warnsdorff's Algorithm
 Magic Knight‟s Tours
 Knight‟s Tours and Cryptography
 Longest uncrossed knight's path

What is ‘Knight’s Tour?
 Chess problem involving a knight

 Start on a random square

 Visit each square exactly ONCE according to rules

 Tour called closed, if ending square is same as the starting.

 Variations of the knight's tour problem.
 Different sizes than the usual 8 × 8
 Irregular (non-rectangular) boards.

A Knights Tour – Legal Moves

Theory
 Knight‟s tour can be represented as a graph.
 The vertices - Represent the squares of the board.
 The edges - Represent a knight‟s legal moves between
squares.
 Knight‟s tour is simply an instance of Hamiltonian path.
 A closed tour is a Hamiltonian cycle.
 Knight's tour problem can be solved in linear time.

Computer Algorithms
 Brute-force search ???
 Iterates through all possible move sequences.
 For a regular 8x8 chess board, there are approximately 4×1051
possible move sequences.
 Brute force approach can never be applied to the Knight's Tour
problem.
 Neural network solutions.
 Can be solved by a neural network implementation.
 Every legal knight's move is represented by a neuron.

 Warnsdorff's algorithm

Warnsdorff's Algorithm
 Heuristic Method.
 Introduced by H. C. Warnsdorff in 1823.
 Any initial position of the knight on the board.
 Each move is made to the adjacent vertex with the least
degree.
 May also more generally be applied to any graph.
 On many graphs that occur in practice this heuristic is able to
successfully locate a solution in linear time.

 Some definitions:
 A position Q is accessible from a position P if P can move to Q by a
single knight's move, and Q has not yet been visited.
 The accessibility of a position P is the number of positions accessible
from P.
 Algorithm:
1. set P to be a random initial position on the board
2. mark the board at P with the move number "1"
3. for each move number from 2 to the number of squares on the
board:
1. let S be the set of positions accessible from the input position
2. set P to be the position in S with minimum accessibility
3. mark the board at P with the current move number
4. return the marked board – each square will be marked with the
move number on which it is visited.

 Warnsdorff‟s rule is heuristic
 It is not guaranteed to find a solution.
 It can fail for boards larger than 76x76.
 The reason for using these heuristics instead of an algorithm
guaranteed to work is speed.
 Improvements by decomposing;
1. Decompose a large board into smaller rectangles.
2. Solve those sub rectangles.
3. Smaller solutions are then joined to form a knight‟s tour.

A 60x60 Knight’s Tour generated by decomposition

Magic Knight’s Tours
 The squares of the chess board are numbered in the order of
the knight‟s moves.
 Each column, row, and diagonal must sum to the same
number.
 The first magic knight‟s tour (with sum 260) by William
Beverley (1848 ).

Beverley’s tour

1 18
48 31 50 33 16 63 260
What’s the
30 51 46 3 62 19 14 35 260 magic
number?
47 2 49 32 15 34 17 64 260

52 29 4 45 20 61 36 13 260

5 44 25 56 9 40 21 60 260

28 53 8 41 24 57 12 37 260

43 6 55 26 39 10 59 22 260
n (n  1) 54 27 42 7 58 23 38 11 260
64 x 65
16 260 260 260 260 260 260 260 260
16

a) First semi-magic knight‟s tour
b) In each quadrant, the sum of the numbers equals 520 and each of the rows and
columns adds to 130
c) The sum of the numbers in each 2x2 section is 130

Existence of full magic knight‟s tour on 8x8 was a 150-year-old unsolved
problem.
In August 5, 2003, after nearly 62 computation-days, a search
showed that no 8x8 fully magic knight’s tour is possible.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2003-08-06/magictours/

Knight’s Tours and Cryptography
 A cryptotour is a puzzle in which the 64 words or syllables of
a verse are printed on the squares of a chessboard and are to
be read in the sequence of a knight‟s tour.
 The earliest known examples of a cryptotour were printed in
the mid 1800s in a French magazine.
 Published before the invention of crossword puzzles (1890).

Example of a cryptotour from 1870

Longest uncrossed knight's path
 The problem is to find the longest path the knight can take on
nxn board, such that the path does not intersect itself.

References
 “Knight's tour” [Online]. Available:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight%27s_tour
 “Longest uncrossed knight's path” [Online]. Available:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_uncrossed_knight%
27s_path
 Ben Hill and Kevin Tostado (Dec 18 2004), “Knight’s Tours”.
[Online]. Available:
http://faculty.olin.edu/~sadams/DM/ktpaper.pdf

Knight's Tour

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Knight's Tour