{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/taming-the-knights-tour-minimizing-turns-and","title":"Taming the Knight's Tour: Minimizing Turns and Crossings","arxiv_id":"1904.02824","date":"2019-04-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Juan Jose Besa","Timothy Johnson","Nil Mamano","Martha C. Osegueda","Parker Williams"],"abstract":"We introduce two new metrics of \"simplicity\" for knight's tours: the number of turns and the number of crossings. We give a novel algorithm that produces tours with $9.25n+O(1)$ turns and $12n+O(1)$ crossings on an $n\\times n$ board, and we show lower bounds of $(6-\\epsilon)n$ and $4n-O(1)$ on the respective problems of minimizing these metrics. Hence, our algorithm achieves approximation ratios of $9.25/6+o(1)$ and $3+o(1)$. Our algorithm takes linear time and is fully parallelizable, i.e., the tour can be computed in $O(n^2/p)$ time using $p$ processors in the CREW PRAM model. We generalize our techniques to rectangular boards, high-dimensional boards, symmetric tours, odd boards with a missing corner, and tours for $(1,4)$-leapers. In doing so, we show that these extensions also admit a constant approximation ratio on the minimum number of turns, and on the number of crossings in most cases.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02824v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.02824v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"taming-the-knights-tour-minimizing-turns-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/nmamano/MinCrossingsKnightsTour","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}