nguyendytrich / knights-tour

A Java implementation of the Knight's Tour problem using Trees

#Knight's Tour

#Running the solution yourself This project was not meant to be compiled into an .jar file, but to be run simply in Eclipse. Simply clone the repository and import it to Eclipse.

##About The Knight's Tour problem asks if it is possible for, in the context of chess, a knight piece to touch each tile on the board once and only once. It is possible for a tour to be closed, meaning that the square the tour ends on is also its starting point.

This particular solution tests for a standard 8x8 chessboard scenario, starting the knight from a corner. Using supervised brute-forced, meaning solutions are generated by brute force using a parameter as supervision (in this case an heuristic mapping of desirable squares), this algorithm generates a tree and prunes branches with a depth of 64, indicating that every square has been landed on.

##Notes and Caveats This solution does not give the least number of possible solutions. It generates redundancies by disregarding mirror moves. For example, for the first move from tile A8, the only possible moves are to B6 or C7. These moves are mirrors of each other, yet this solution does not account for that and instead generates two branches. There are also redundancies when the solution reports its answers. In the output file, many of the moves are redundant until the 46th move. It would be more concise to have a graphical representation of the tree, however that was not the goal of this project.