The Knight’s Tour Problem and Rudrata’s Verse

Autor: G. S. S. Murthy
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Resonance. 25:1095-1116
ISSN: 0973-712X
0971-8044
DOI: 10.1007/s12045-020-1026-7
Popis: If a chess-knight is moved on a vacant chess-board [8 × 8 square] such that it visits each one of the 64 squares once and once only, the knight is said to execute a Knight’s Tour. Solution to the knight’s tour problem was known in India as earlyasthe 9th century AD as a demonstration of wizardry in composing 32-syllable verses in Sanskrit. A pair of meaningful verses is composed in such a manner that when one verse is written serially (left to right and top to bottom) one syllable a square to fill up 8 × 4 cells — half of a chess board — the other verse appears as the Knight’s Tour. The earliest example of this skill in poetry-composition is given in a Sanskrit treatise on poetics, kāvyālaṅkāra written by Rudraṭa who lived around the ninth century A.D. Knight’s Tour as a mathematical problem was first noticed and discussed in the West by Leonard Euler in the eighteenth century. After providing the back ground to the subject as a puzzle on the chess-board, a problem in mathematics and as a challenge in verse-composition, the article discusses the special characteristic of Rudrata’s example where the pair of verses reduces to a single verse.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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