A knight's tour of a Chessboard (or any other grid) is a sequence of moves by a knight Chess piece (which may only make moves which simultaneously shift one square along one axis and two along the other) such that each square of the board is visited exactly once (i.e., a Hamiltonian Circuit). If the final position is a knight's move away from the first position, the tour is called re-entrant. The first figure above shows a knight's tour on a Chessboard. The second set of figures shows six knight's tours on an Chessboard, all but the first of which are re-entrant. The final tour has the additional property that it is a Semimagic Square with row and column sums of 260 and main diagonal sums of 348 and 168.
Löbbing and Wegener (1996) computed the number of cycles covering the directed knight's graph for an Chessboard. They obtained , where , i.e., 8,121,130,233,753,702,400. They also computed the number of undirected tours, obtaining an incorrect answer 33,439,123,484,294 (which is not divisible by 4 as it must be), and so are currently redoing the calculation.
The following results are given by Kraitchik (1942). The number of possible tours on a board for , 4, ... are 8, 0, 82, 744, 6378, 31088, 189688, 1213112, ... (Kraitchik 1942, p. 263). There are 14 tours on the rectangle, two of which are symmetrical. There are 376 tours on the rectangle, none of which is closed. There are 16 symmetric tours on the rectangle and 8 closed tours on the rectangle. There are 58 symmetric tours on the rectangle and 28 closed tours on the rectangle. There are five doubly symmetric tours on the square. There are 1728 tours on the square, 8 of which are symmetric. The longest ``uncrossed'' knight's tours on an board for , 4, ... are 2, 5, 10, 17, 24, 35, ... (Sloane's A003192).
See also Chess, Kings Problem, Knights Problem, Magic Tour, Queens Problem, Tour
References
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Wegener, I. and Löbbing, M. ``The Number of Knight's Tours Equals 33,439,123,484,294--Counting with Binary
Decision Diagrams.'' Electronic J. Combinatorics 3, R5 1-4, 1996.
http://www.combinatorics.org/Volume_3/volume3.html#R5.
© 1996-9 Eric W. Weisstein