The history of the knight's tour
The knight's tour was a mathematical curiosity, a poetic form, a stage trick and a computer-science exercise long before it was a phone game. Here is the whole ride, from Sanskrit verse to Deep Blue.
The poem you can ride
Rudrata's verse is written in four lines of eight syllables. Read it left to right and it is a poem; follow the path of a knight and the same syllables spell it out. The figure is called turagapadabandha — “arrangement in the steps of a horse”. Later, the 14th-century philosopher Vedanta Desika built a knight's tour into two linked verses on a 4×8 board, and Bhat Nilakantha described three fully symmetric closed tours around 1600 — sixty years before Euler.
From chaturanga to the gauntlet
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♞ Oldest unchanged move
The knight has moved the same way since chaturanga in the 6th century — longer than the queen's modern move by nearly a thousand years.
🃏 A royal party trick
The Turk, an 18th-century fake automaton, performed a closed knight's tour as part of its act. A human was hiding inside.
📚 A novel's skeleton
Georges Perec used a 10×10 knight's tour to order the chapters of Life A User's Manual.
Write the next line
The mathematicians have counted the tours. The only thing left is to ride one.
▶ Play Knight's Gauntlet