Chapter 18, Problem 18.32PE

(Game: Knight’s Tour) The Knight’s Tour is an ancient puzzle. The objective is to move a knight, starting from any square on a chessboard, to every other square once, as shown in Figure 18.15a. Note the knight makes only L-shaped moves (two spaces in one direction and one space in a perpendicular direction). As shown in Figure 18.15b, the knight can move to eight squares. Write a program that displays the moves for the knight, as shown in Figure 18.15c. When you click a cell, the knight is placed at the cell. This cell will be the starting point for the knight. Click the Solve button to display the path for a solution.

(Hint: A brute-force approach for this problem is to move the knight from one square to another available square arbitrarily. Using such an approach, your program will take a long time to finish. A better approach is to employ some heuristics. A knight has two, three, four, six, or eight possible moves, depending on its location. Intuitively, you should attempt to move the knight to the least accessible squares first and leave those more accessible squares open, so there will be a better chance of success at the end of the search.)