• What is a Knight's Tour?
• How does this implementation find a solution?
• Screenshots
• Installation Requirements
• Usage

Given a chess board of an arbitrary width and height, take a single knight starting at any position on the board and find a path such that it visits every spot on the board exactly once.

To solve the knight's tour, I created an implementation of Warnsdorff's rule, a popular heuristic that relies on the following rule: Given each move that is currently possible, calculate the number of moves that are available from the potential new location. Move to the spot with the fewest potential moves.

With this heuristic, there is the possibility for ties between moves that have the same number of potential moves. To resolve ties, I select the first move available and store the other moves as "critical points" that I can return to later if the algorithm runs out of potential moves without finding a solution. If the algorithm reaches this state, it will back the solution up to the most recent critical point, mark the previous move as a "failed move" so that it does not reattempt a known bad route, then begin solving with the other tied move(s). It will repeat this process until either a solution is found, or the algorithm runs out of critical points and exits without a solution.

I have made several optimizations to increase performance, such as caching the board state to reduce the number of calculations, and utilizing pass-by-reference for known performance bottlenecks. Performance will vary depending on the machine executing the program and the size of the board, but a MacBook Pro averages about 6.5 seconds to solve a 128x128 board starting at (1,1).

• Any g++ compiler (c++11 needed for chrono)

1. Clone the repo
2. Run compile-[os].[sh|bat] to compile the source code into an executable
3. Run executable ./bin/knights-tour.[bin|exe] [x] [y] [width] [height]

The knight's tour solution (if one is found) will be printed as Tour Solution <width>x<height>.txt.