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Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

funnyhowtheknightmoves.com

201–210 of 211 posts

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#201

I think the instructions should be: Move to the square indicated below the board without moving to a square the queen can capture and without capturing the queen. Once accomplished a new square will be indicated. Repeat until all possible squares are done.

Thank you! Once I saw this comment, very satisfying puzzle. At first I was fumbling my way through randomly, but around halfway I started to visualize the board as two "sets" of connected paths and grokked how to switch between them using the lower-right quadrant.

> Thank you! Once I saw this comment, very satisfying puzzle. At first I was fumbling my way through randomly, but around halfway I started to visualize the board as two "sets" of connected paths and grokked how to switch between them using the lower-right quadrant.

Exactly this - I used the upper right quadrant to switch lanes, but the idea is the same: if you cannot reach the target in the current lane, switch lanes and try again.

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#202
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of makes you appreciate the amount of work most games put into UI design. This game mechanic is very simple and it still needed documentation... And the documentation wasn't enough! Immensely complex games these days are so good at providing hints and player feedback that many often don't need their tutorial levels.

IMO the documentation says to do something completely different than what the apparent goal actually is.

Sure. It's a different facet of the same problem. There's a damn good reason that professional software development organizations hire designers and technical writers, and while many developers like to think so, it's not merely to save them time. Developers often suck at making docs for other developers; reasoning about communicating to people one step removed from that gets even dicier. As a developer before I learned good design principles, I often fell into the trap of assuming my being able to assemble something in code gave me sufficient understanding of why it was designed that way. Ah, the hubris of inexperience.

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#203

I think the instructions should be: Move to the square indicated below the board without moving to a square the queen can capture and without capturing the queen. Once accomplished a new square will be indicated. Repeat until all possible squares are done.

I suppose you win the 10000 IQ award for being the only person on the website to realize?

Probably a regular entry in /r/IAMVeryIntelligent

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#205
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the East Bay, but just a little bit too far West for that to work out for me. :(

Berkeley Chess School does lots of casual tournaments (and classes): https://www.berkeleychessschool.org/programs/adult-chess-tou... (One of my kids does a lot with BCS and loves them) There's also a small sidewalk chess scene on Telegraph: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/01/30/community-chess-tele...

Ohh, nice. Berkeley is much more reasonable for me.

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#206
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It asked me to move to e8...but that's a move where the Queen takes Knight. I don't get it.

Look again. The queen doesn't take the knight at E8.

You're right, but I naturally hesitated to move there because I play chess a lot.

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#208
If you drop the sequential restriction, this becomes a pretty neat shortest path problem, essentially the same as LeetCode 847, but the simple dynamic programming approach does not work here (too much memory needed). It can be transformed to TSP, though, which gives an optimal solution (using Concorde) of just 46 moves: http://directory.iit.bme.hu/~salvi/archive/snippets/knight/k...

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#209

I think the instructions should be: Move to the square indicated below the board without moving to a square the queen can capture and without capturing the queen. Once accomplished a new square will be indicated. Repeat until all possible squares are done.

Where was this comment 5 minutes in?

Re: Ain't it funny how the knight moves?

#210
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, it's not accurate. It says "move the knight to every square" but the game is actually "move the knight to the next square specified".

It might not be obvious, but the specified squares are "all the squares in the order right to left, top to bottom without those the queen can attack" as the text instructs.

The text changed since my comment was posted.
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