The task is truly complex: Navigating a knight around a chessboard, visiting each square but never the same square twice. It took me a while to code, and I don’t think my solution is particularly elegant, but it works.
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I first read about the Knight’s Tour when I was a kid. My mom bought the Time Life series of books on computers. It it, the Knight’s Tour program is presented, which fascinated me. After all this time, I finally set out to code the tour myself.
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The next step in hopping a knight around a chessboard is determining which squares from its current position represent valid moves. Code must be combined from last week’s lesson (setting the knight on the chessboard at a random spot) with the movement code presented a few lessons back.
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Continuing from last week’s Lesson, the task is now to combine the chessboard output from this month’s Exercise solution with the knight’s random location. This step is the next one leading to the result, which is to plot how a knight moves on a chessboard.
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A chessboard is a gird, traditionally eight-by-eight squares for 64 positions. This game matrix can be implemented in code in a variety of ways, with a two-dimensional array being the most obvious. But this option isn’t what I chose when programming how a knight moves (from last week’s Lesson).
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Computers and chess go together like Mr. Spock and Star Trek. The character of Spock is pure genius, a crazy addition to the mix that provided depth and wonder to the TV show and later movies. In chess, it’s the knight that provides the crazy addition, making the game of chess more than an advanced variation on checkers.
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I don’t believe I’ll ever absorb all the wondrous potential of Linux/Unix. Case in point is the /dev/random file. It’s exactly what the name implies: random stuff. And you can use this nifty file in your C programs to generate random values.
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Continuing from last week’s Lesson, just as you can’t use the equal sign to assign an mpz_t huge integer value, you can’t use the standard arithmetic operators to do math — huge math. Nope, you must use special GMP library functions to do the math.
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I’ve written a few books on using external libraries, which I shamelessly plug later in this post. After confirming that the library is installed (see last week’s post), the next step isn’t to code, but rather to peruse the online documentation, the API or Application Programming Interface.
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Unlike real numbers, integers are stored in binary as-is: The bits are read and values set. The only limit on an integer’s value is on the number of bits in the binary chunk — the bit width — which sets the value’s range, positive and negative or just positive.
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