Ants Playing Chess Find New Solutions To Old Problem

Monday, February 3, 2014 - 15:20 in Mathematics & Economics

The tour When a knight touches every spot on a chess board and returns to its original spot, as shown here in numbered moves, it's called a closed tour. Numberphile / YouTube Remove all the pieces from a chess board except for one knight. Then try to move the knight across all 64 squares of the board, touching each once. (As a reminder, knights move in a L-shape, two spaces in one direction, and then one space left or right, or up or down, at a 90- degree angle.) This so-called "knight's tour" is very difficult to achieve for a single person, but mathematicians have calculated that there are a mind-boggling number of ways to pull it off. If you end up at the spot you started, you'd be completing a so-called "closed tour." There are...

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