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Questions tagged [checkerboard]

A puzzle involving checkerboards: grids of squares alternating black and white in color, most commonly an 8x8 board.

47 votes
4 answers
10k views

The coolest checkerboard magic trick

In the small town of Terni (Italy), there's a couple of young friends named Marco and Leonardo, who like to perform magic tricks to a restricted audience of common friends and relatives. They like to ...
7 votes
1 answer
544 views

Chess - Knight Mate

What is the fastest, in terms of moves, for a legal game to come to a checkmate, either black or white with a Knight and such that both all other cases of the checkmated King are attacked by an ...
4 votes
1 answer
207 views

Chess - I will eat!

Suppose that you are playing White, and your aim is to eat a black piece (pawns qualitfy) in the fewest moves as possible and Black are not cooperating at all, and, even more, Black's aim is to ...
32 votes
5 answers
5k views

How can 3 queens control the white squares?

It is well known that there is no way of arranging 4 queens on a checker board in such a way that every square is occupied or threatened. Now consider a slight variation where we only need to cover ...
5 votes
1 answer
149 views

How many queens are needed to attack all white squares?

This question: How can 3 queens control the white squares? got me thinking... What is the fewest number of queens needed to attack every white square? Rules: Only queens allowed Every white square is ...
32 votes
3 answers
5k views

How many squares can 4 queens control?

Though there is no strict mathematical proof, it has been shown via brute-force that no arrangement of 4 or fewer queens can control every square on a standard 8x8 chessboard. So, out of the 64 ...
14 votes
1 answer
719 views

Grid infection with diagonal adjacencies

A community consists of 81 houses laid out in a 9 x 9 square grid. Every household is friends with their eight orthogonal and diagonal neighbors (except for the houses on the perimeter which have only ...
18 votes
4 answers
2k views

Paint 21 Squares of a 7×7 Board Without Forming a Rectangle

Got a nice puzzle from my friend, when he was competing in IWYMIC/IMC 2011. Paint $21$ of the $49$ squares of a $7 \times 7$ board so that no four painted squares form the four corners of a rectangle....
4 votes
2 answers
259 views

Maximum number of kings that can exit

N kings are placed on a chessboard, with at most one king on any square. Following standard rules of movement (one square in any direction), every king must be able to reach some edge of the board ...
23 votes
4 answers
5k views

Checkerboard Infection

There is a dangerous bacteria, Checkerichia Coli, (or C. Coli for short) which lives in the squares of checkerboards. Squares with this bacteria living in their digestive systems are said to have &...
14 votes
2 answers
816 views

How many total checkmates can you possibly make against the enemy king?

Just an interesting idea for a puzzle that I had So, I decided to see how many possible checkmate I could theoretically make, in a legal position that can be legally reached. Always assume that the ...
9 votes
5 answers
1k views

Professor Halfbrain and the 9x9 chessboard (Part 2)

This puzzle is the continuation of Professor Halfbrain and the 9x9 chessboard (Part 1). The difference is that "distance at least $2$" has now become "distance more than $2$". ...
5 votes
3 answers
350 views

A tribute to "Most ways to uncheck the king"

Today, we had the great privilege to see @Paul Panzer's answer being ticked at @thesilican's absorbing puzzle. I here propose a variant of his puzzle where it's not mandatory to use a legal chess game....
26 votes
1 answer
857 views

The life of a Knight: Conway style

So I was thinking about Conway's game of life and the ridiculous kinds of patterns that can be made (Things that move across infinite space etc) and then I thought, hey could a chess knight do this as ...
0 votes
1 answer
155 views

How many roads in a Tak square?

The board game Tak is played on a chess-like board of variable size (most commonly, 5x5 and 6x6). Players place and move pieces on the board with the goal of creating a "road", which is a ...

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