Category: General

ing Break

A knight’s tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square only once.

It is an interesting chess puzzle that starts by removing all chess pieces from a chess board and leaving just one knight on any of the 64 squares.  The puzzle involves trying to make the knight jump around the board and eventually land on all 64 squares without landing on a square already visited.

The knight’s tour problem is the mathematical problem of finding a knight’s tour. Creating a program to find a knight’s tour is a common problem given to computer science students.

The earliest known reference to the knight’s tour problem dates back to the 9th century AD. In Rudraṭa’s Kavyalankara, a Sanskrit work on Poetics, the pattern of a knight’s tour on a half-board has been presented as an elaborate poetic figure (“citra-alaṅkāra”) called the “turagapadabandha” or ‘arrangement in the steps of a horse.’

Below is a very good video describing the knight’s tour problem from a mathematics perspective.

The second scholastic tournament of the year is this Saturday at Kealing Middle School.  Good luck to the 28 Spicewood students registered in this tournament.  The school is located on North I35 and it takes about 20-25 minutes to drive there from Spicewood Elementary.

Google Map of Kealing Middle School

We have some helpful advice for all parents to help your kids prepare for the tournament.  First, please make sure to get a good night sleep.  The tournament day is long and you want to be well rested.  There is typically a lot of downtime between rounds, so make sure you bring healthy snacks and drinks.  The school will have a concessions area, so you can support their school by making purchases through them as well.

We typically find and reserve a section for Spicewood students.  This area becomes our homebase where the students hang out between round, review their recent matches and practice chess.  We recommend bringing a couple of comfortable folding chairs in case seating is limited.  We also recommend that you leave portable video games at home.  We have seen parents and kids bring books to read, games to play (other than chess), homework, coloring books, soccer balls, etc.   It has been normal to have wifi access to the Internet, but each school is different, so we are not 100% sure about this at Kealing.

This will be a relatively small tournament with around 300 participants.  Round 1 starts at 9AM for the Open section and 9:30AM for the Scholastic sections and you should find your board at least 30 minutes before the start.  We recommend arriving as early as possible in order to claim a good spot to reside for the day.  If you plan to be late to any round, please make sure you request a BYE for that round with Lori Balkum (Lori.Balkum@austinchesstournaments.com) who will be located in the computer room which handles all the pairings and result entry.

Results of the tournament rounds will be posted on bulletin boards outside each section as well as online on this page:

https://www.austinchesstournaments.com/events/659

At this week’s meeting, the new club members will arrive.  We ask all returning club members to make sure and help the new kids feel welcome and help them learn how our club sets up each Friday.  We will watch the ten golden moves video and then make a few announcements to the kids and parents.

Announcements:

1. Upcoming Tournament information
2. Chess club folder information
3. Chess store and chess bucks information
4. Expected behavior during club meetings

Last year, we noticed many of our chess club folders were getting lost or damaged over time.  We decided this year to purchase plastic folders that are more durable and have a built in pocket for the kids to store their earned Chess Bucks.  We chose the Mead StayPut folder shown below:

At tomorrow’s Chess club meeting, we have only returning students attending.  New students will start the following week.  Here is a short 7 minute video we plan to watch during tomorrow’s meeting on the three phases of a Chess game.  The Opening, the Middlegame and the Endgame.

Phases of the Chess game Chesskid video

You will need to log in using your Chesskid account to watch this full 7 minute video.  If you don’t remember your Chesskid account information, or don’t have one, please contact Chris Jones during the meeting or email him at chris@spicewoodchess.org