|
Knight Moves!!
Anyone who has ever played Chess knows the Knight is
by far the trickiest piece on the board. The Knight may not be the
most powerful piece, but it is one of the deadliest. Due to the
baffling complexity of the Knight's unusual movements, it is often very
difficult to predict exactly what this sneaky piece is up to next!!
The Knight is sometimes known as the Assassin for its unique ability to
sneak up on you!
This difficult puzzle uses the intricate patterns of the Knight's moves to
great effect.
|
 |
Just to refresh your memory, the Knight always jumps
to a square of a different color. If it is sitting on white, it must jump
to gray. It can move two squares in any of four directions plus one
square left or right, up or down.
If my explanation isn't good enough, just study the picture and you should
figure it out!!
A standard chess board has 64 squares, but as you will soon see, for our
puzzle there are only 36 squares.
|
 |
In the puzzle below, the Knight starts in Square 1 (also known as Square
A1 on the grid shown further below).
Your job is to track the 37 consecutive moves that
take the Knight from A1 all the way around the board and back to A1 on the
37th move. Don't forget the Knight cannot move to the same space twice!!
As you will see in the diagram below, some of the Knight's
moves have been revealed. For example, the Knight's 5th move was to
Square B4 and its 32nd move was to F5.
Can you logically determine the missing numbers
for the other squares and can up with the order of all 37 moves?
|
|
|
 |
I found this puzzle to be very challenging. In some ways it
was like solving a maze where you have several choices of moves in
some spots.
I never came up with a systematic way to crack this puzzle open
although I am sure there is one. I had no idea how to use a
Logic Puzzle Truth Table.
Since I didn't have a good way to
solve it, I did it by brute force/trial and error. Like a
rat in a maze, I had to start over a lot of times. It took
my 120-something IQ age-ravished brain a couple hours. (But I will
let in on a secret - I had fun!!) You should do better.
Good luck!
|
Send your answers to Rick Archer,
dance@ssqq.com There
are two ways to send them. First, you can simply send me a picture
of your results filling up the box above with the number of each
move in each box.
|
Or you can notate your moves as such: 1 A1, 2 B3 (or C2),
3?, 4?, 5 B4 etc, 6?, 7?, 8 E2... 37 A1.
|
|
|
|
Hint for the
Private Lessons Logic Puzzle: After filling in all your Truth Chart
possibilities, map out a time line for the various clues. You will notice that
there are three different strings of consecutive clues.
Of the three "Strings", one String
had only two possible solutions. The other two strings both had three
possible solutions.
I named the String with only two
choices "String A" and "String B". By comparing these two Master
Strings to one of the other two strings (which both seemed to have three
possible solutions), I was able to isolate the eventual solution.
In other words, I matched String A
to String Two (C, D, and E) to create sub-Strings AC, AD, and AE). Then I
matched String B to C, D, and E as well to create sub-strings BC, BD, BE.
I came up with only two possible correct answers out of these six possibilities.
Then I compared these two new
remaining possibilities to the Third string which also had three possible
answers (F, G, and H). This trick eliminated all but one possibility which
proved to be the correct answer. This was tedious, but effective.
Back to
Private Lessons Logic Puzzle
|
