Knight tours on an 8x8 chessboard

A "knight tour" is a sequence of legal knight moves which does not move onto a square previously occupied. A "complete knight tour" is one in which every square of the chess board has been visited exactly once. A "closed knight tour" is a complete tour which returns to the square it began. An "open knight tour" is a complete tour which does not return to it's starting position.

The MAPLEV4 knight package contains several routines designed to find knight tours on a chess board. The MAPLEV4 knight worksheet gives examples of the procedures. This mws file is also avaiilable as an html file:
knight tours in MAPLE If you have MAPLEV4 and Windows 3.1 or better then here is how to load the knight package:

create a subdirectory "games"of your maplev4/share directory,
create a subdirectory "knight"of your maplev4/share/games directory,
copy knight.mpl into this knight subdirectory,
read this text file into maple and save the resulting knight.m file in the "games" subdirectory created above,
in a new session of maple type:
with(share):readshare(knight,games);

In MAPLEV5 or better, it is safe to simply read in the file by typing

read(`e:\maplestuff\games\knight\knight.mpl`);
(substitute for "e:\maplestuff\games\knight\" whatever your path is).

REFERENCES W.W. R. Ball and H.S.M. Coxeter, Mathematical Recreations and Essays, 13th ed, Dover, New York, 1987

wdj

Last modified 10-26-99.