We've all heard of the Knight's Tour puzzle: find a route for a knight that passes through all the squares on a chess board. But let's be honest, it's a little bit boring. So, let's give the knight a bit of a challenge.
Task
Write a program that takes the knight through all the squares on an arbitrary-sized, arbitrary-shaped chess board. It should take the chess board as input and output the set of moves and the starting position. In the event of an impossible board, it should output the set of moves and starting position for a tour with the longest possible length. Note: the knight doesn't need to take a round trip; assume they have another way to get home.
Chess pieces are small, so your code needs to be small enough for the knight to carry around.
Input
The input will be a string-based or array-based representation of a chess board, where a non-blank / truthy value is a square, and a blank / falsy value is an empty space. For simplicity's sake I will use #
s and
s arranged in a grid for the examples.
Output
The output will be two large integers, followed by a series of 4-bit integers, or your language's equivalent. The two large integers will represent the starting co-ordinates, and the following numbers will represent a move like so:
7 0
6 1
K
5 2
4 3
where K
is the position before the move, and the number is the position after the move.
Examples
As there are a lot of possible solutions to the Knight's Tour puzzle, I will only provide example outputs. There may be more outputs.
###
# #
###
0 0 3 0 5 2 7 4 1
AFC
D H
GBE
## ##
##
##
(4, 0) [5, 6, 3, 1, 6, 3, 0]
CF HA
BE
DG
New challenge: Come up with more examples