Knight's Tour backtracking infinite loop

Question

I\'m trying to write code for the Knight\'s Tour:

A knight\'s tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits ever

Answer 1

This program seems to be absolutely correct, I cannot see a bug in this code.

However, the knight's tour IS a highly complex algorithm. Actually, the program needs to check up to 64!=1*2*3*...*64 different ways through the board. This is a number with 89 zeroes!

In many cases the backtracking will stop at an early branch, but some branches will go up forever.

If the tour starting at 0,0 is foudn so quickly, then it might either be pure chance, or the arrays xMove and yMove were cleverly initialized, such that a solution for (0,0) is found quickly.

So the problem is not your program, but it is the algorithm. I suggest you to do some research on this topic. There are many algorithms for the knight's tour which will give you a solution in more reasonable time.

Answer 2

I don't have enough reputation to comment, but this is more like a comment. Check here for a python implementation of Warnsdorff's Rule. Further optimizations over Warnsdorff's Rule is discussed here