A counterexample to Henry E. Dudeney’s star puzzle

A. V. Ravsky

doi:10.30970/ms.56.2.215-217

A counterexample to Henry E. Dudeney’s star puzzle

A. V. Ravsky Pidstryhach Institute for Applied Problems of Mechanics and Mathematics, Lviv, Ukraine

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30970/ms.56.2.215-217

Keywords: Henry Dudeney; queen path

Abstract

We found a solution of Henry E. Dudeney’s star puzzle (a path on a chessboard from c5 to d4 in 14 straight strokes) in 14 queen moves, which was claimed impossible by the puzzle author. Generalizing this result to other board sizes, we obtained bounds on minimal number of moves in a board filling queen path with given source and destination.

References

H.E. Dudeney, The star puzzle, The Strand Magazine, 41 (1911), 362. archive.org/details/TheStrandMagazineAnIllustratedMonthly

H.E. Dudeney, 536 puzzles and curious problems, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1967. jnsilva.ludicum.org/HMR13_14/536.pdf

H.E. Dudeney, The Canterbury puzzles and other Curious problems, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1958 (in Russian, M.: Mir, 1986).

M.S. Klamkin, Solutions, The American Mathematical Monthly, 62 (1955), No6, 443.

D.E. Knuth, Dudeney’s puzzles and perplexities in The Strand Magazine, 2001. www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/dudeney-strand.txt

C. Rivera, Puzzle 664. The queen covering the chessboard, primepuzzles.net/puzzles/puzz_664.htm

Published

2021-12-27

How to Cite

Ravsky, A. V. (2021). A counterexample to Henry E. Dudeney’s star puzzle. Matematychni Studii, 56(2), 215-217. https://doi.org/10.30970/ms.56.2.215-217

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Issue

Vol. 56 No. 2 (2021)

Section

Problem Section

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Matematychni Studii is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.