Lost art??

[nendil]

How many of you know how to play (western) chess? (without looking it up on Wikipedia?)

How many of you have played a game of chess in the last 10 years?

Comments

[nendil.livejournal.com]

Haha I hate using knights so you would probably kick my ass.

(not helped by all those years of Knight's Tour assignments.)

[torkell]

The Knight's tour is one of the few puzzles I've left to solve in Professor Layton and Pandor's Box. It also took me about a month of working at it off and on to solve the Eight Queen's puzzle in the first one (the smaller ones were easy as there's a nice pattern, but the full 8x8 was *hard*).

[nendil.livejournal.com]

Wait a minute what kind of a computer science nerd ARE YOU <>

[torkell]

The sort that has a short attention span? :)

I don't think I actually spent that long on the puzzle, probably only a few hours in total. There were several instances of attacking it for 15 minutes, getting bored, and trying a different puzzle instead (and Professor Layton only lets you pause the game, it doesn't let you save a half-complete puzzle). I was tempted to write a program to solve it, and I may well do that for the Knight's Tour puzzle (or look it up, but that feels more cheating than writing a program myself).

[nendil.livejournal.com]

You mean you weren't required to write a Knight's Tour algorithm for class? Obviously you didn't get a REAL CS education. ;)

Granted, I had to look it up too just to make sure I was doing it right while working on that large-size puzzle. ._.

[torkell]

Nope, didn't have to do that at University. I did write a route-solver for the London Underground, if that's any consolation.

To be honest, if I were to write a Knight's Tour solver just to run once for the 8x8 puzzle I'd write a brute-force "try every option" program and leave it to run for however long it took (probably not that long - modern computers have a scary amount of processing power).