Jonathan Berkowitz

From Wikipedia, “The knight’s tour is a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard. The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once.” Variations involve chessboards of different sizes than the usual 8 × 8, as well as non-rectangular boards. It is an instance of the Hamiltonian path problem in graph theory. The earliest known references date back to the 9th century AD. Leonhard Euler published one of the earliest papers on the subject.

The puzzle has been adapted as a “knight’s-tour crypt,” another puzzle type from the National Puzzlers’ League, NPL. The NPL instructions explain that, “A rectangular grid of letters or other shape contains a message to be discovered by moving from the starting space to other spaces as the knight moves on a chessboard. Each letter is visited exactly once. The enumeration is given, and the starting letter, which may be anywhere in the grid, is underlined. The author’s name may appear at the end.”

Here is one for you to try. In this puzzle, the starting point is the top left corner of the grid. The solution appears at the end of this column.

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