Introduction

We estimate that chess is more than 1,000 years old. However, with chess being as old as it is, people have
gone beyond playing the game as it was originally intended. Generations of people have been fascinated in
the mathematics deeply rooted in the game. For example, something as simple as deciding whether to make
a trade or not involves doing maths. By working out the relative value of your pieces compared to your
opponent’s, you can make an informed decision after some basic arithmetic.

The mathematics of chess and the century-old theories and problems that incited legendary mathematicians,
such as Euler and Gauss, still gain interest today. This essay will take you through some of the most popular
mathematical problems that have arisen from the historic game of chess.

Chess and Big Numbers

A game of chess always starts with an ‘opening’. This refers to the sequence of moves and defences made
by either side at the very start of the game. This aspect of chess is completely based around chess theory. So
how many different openings can you play? King’s Pawn Opening
Firstly, white has twenty options for their first move. Then black can
respond to the move white played from another twenty options. This
may not sound like a lot, but black has 20 options for each move
white plays. This means that after the first move from each player,
there are already 400 different possible board positions! Openings can
last for multiple moves and The Oxford Companion to Chess lists a
total of 1,327 named openings and variants in chess. I think for now
I’ll just stick to the King’s Pawn Opening…

But there is more to chess than just the opening. Much more. The American mathematician Claude Shannon
calculated the eponymous Shannon Number: 10120. This is an estimate for the number of different possible
chess games that can be played. This figure is based on an average of about 103 possibilities for a pair of
moves, and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves. To make you understand how big 10 120
actually is, there are more possible 40 move chess games than the number of atoms in the observable
universe (1080). In fact, a lot more. Specifically, more than a billion billion billion billion times more! It
should be pretty clear that the Shannon Number is basically incomprehensible for the human brain.

It is fascinating to see how quickly the number of possible games increases after each move. You already
know that there are 400 possible positions after each player has moved one piece. Let’s see what the
numbers look like after five moves each:
Number of half-moves Number of possible games
1 20
2 400
3 8,902
4 197,281
5 4,865,609
6 119,060,324
7 3,195,901,860
8 84,998,978,956
9 2,439,530,234,167
10 69,352,859,712,417

Note: A ‘half-move’ refers to a move one player makes. In chess, a ‘move’ refers to when both sides have moved a piece.

Perhaps what I love about this most is that it can take less than five moves (ten half-moves) for the game you
are playing to reach a position that has never been reached before in the 500+ year history of chess. Isn’t that
just astonishing!
.

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 The Knight’s Tour A radially symmetric closed Knight's Tour

Time to move on to what I consider to be most beautiful mathematical chess

problem, The Knight’s Tour. A Knight's Tour is a sequence of moves of a Knight
on a chessboard such that the Knight visits every square exactly once. There are
two types of Knight Tours: ‘closed’ – where the Knight ends on a square that is
one Knight's move from the beginning square (so that it could tour the board
again immediately, following the same path), and ‘open’ – when the Knight
cannot move back to the beginning square after the tour ends.

What makes these chess problems so beautiful is that, clearly

shown with The Knight’s Tour, the solutions are just chess
visualisations of Graph Theory problems.

This problem has fascinated mathematicians for centuries. The

earliest known reference to the Knight's Tour problem dates back
to the 9th century AD! Rudraṭa's presented the pattern of a
Knight's Tour on a half-board as an elaborate poetic figure called
the turagapadabandha or 'arrangement in the steps of a horse'.
The same verse in four lines of eight syllables each can be read
Knight's Graph showing all possible paths for a
Knight's Tour on a standard 8 × 8 chessboard. from left to right or by following the path of the Knight on tour.
The numbers on each node indicate the number Since the Indic writing systems used for Sanskrit are syllabic,
of possible moves that can be made from that
position. each syllable can be thought of as representing a square on a
chessboard. Rudrata's example is as follows:

The first line can be read from left to right or by moving from
the first square to the second line, third syllable (2.3), replicating
the Knight’s movement, and then to 1.5 to 2.7 to 4.8 to 3.6 etc.

To understand this better, follow this half-board diagram showing the problem with colours and numbers. If
you move from each colour to the next by going left to right, you will have the same order of colours as if
you moved according to the numbers (in the movement of a Knight).

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 Going either left to right or following the
numbers (in the movement of a Knight), you
will get the same order of colours: RED,
BLUE, GREEN, GREEN, GREEN, BLUE,
BLUE, GREEN, GREEN, BLUE, BLUE,
BLUE, BLUE, GREEN, GREEN, GREEN,
BLUE, GREEN, BLUE, GREEN, GREEN,
BLUE, GREEN, BLUE, GREEN, GREEN,
GREEN, BLUE, BLUE, BLUE, BLUE,
GREEN.
Schwenk proved that for any m × n board
with m ≤ n, a closed Knight's tour is always possible unless one or more of these three conditions are met:

• m and n are both odd

• m = 1, 2, or 4
• m = 3 and n = 4, 6, or 8.
These conditions mean that there are Knight Tour solutions for a Googolplex x Googolplex chessboard…

The table below shows the number of directed tours, both open and closed, on an n x n board, up to n = 8.
This is sequence A165134 in the OEIS.
n Number of directed tours on an n x n board
1 1
2 0
3 0
4 0
5 1,728
6 6,637,920
7 165,575,218,320
8 19,591,828,170,979,904

There are several ways to find a Knight's Tour on a given board with a computer. While you can brute force
the problem, it is not practical to do for the huge numbers involved.

Warnsdorff's rule is a heuristic for finding a single Knight's Tour, first described by H. C. von Warnsdorff in
1823. The Knight is moved so that it always proceeds to the square from which the Knight will have the
fewest onward moves. When calculating the number of onward moves for each candidate square, we do not
count moves that revisit any square already visited. There is the possibility of two or more choices for
having the same number of onward moves, but there are various methods for breaking such ties.
Warnsdorff’s rule may also more generally be applied to any graph. In graph-theoretic terms, each move is
made to the adjacent vertex with the least
degree.

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 Warnsdorff’s rule in action – Each square contains the
number of moves that the Knight could make from that
square. In this case, the rule tells us to move to the square with
the smallest number in it, namely 2.

A very large (130 × 130) Knight's Tour created using

Warnsdorff's Rule
But we still haven’t seen all of the magic The Knight’s Tour has to offer… literally. Leonhard Euler created
the following (semi) magic square.

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This magic square has the following properties:

• Each row and each column sums to 260.

• Each quadrant sums to 520.

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• Each half-row, each half-column, and each quadrant within the main quadrants sums to 130.

But sadly, this is only a semi-magic square as the diagonals do not add up to 260:

With a lot of computing time, we have actually proven that there does not exist a true magic square Knight’s
Tour. However, we have found 140 different semi-magic tours, including closed tours, such as the one
below:

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 Fun with Graphs
After all of these incomprehensibly huge numbers and complex mathematical chess problems, I think it is
time to end with something a little more fun (at least for most people)… Desmos!

While most people use Desmos to solve mathematical problems graphically, I find I spend most of my time
on it messing around with functions to make graph art (yes, I know that sounds weird, but trust me, it is
quite entertaining).

It was wonderful to find that someone had already made a chessboard on Desmos, but unfortunately, I could
not find the actual person who did it, so… credit to whoever spent how many hours it took to make this
amazing Desmos art! However, it was lacking the most important part, the checkerboard pattern. So, I did
my part in putting the final touches on this masterpiece.

Chessboard Graph - Desmos

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From all of this chess-talk, I now really want to play. Anyone fancy a game?

Sources
Introduction
Chess Interest - Google Trends
Chess - Wikipedia

Chess and Big Numbers

Chess Opening - Wikipedia
Shannon Number - Wikipedia
Shannon Number - Numberphile (YouTube)
)

Knight’s Tour + Other Tours

Knight's Tour - Wikipedia

Magic Square Knight’s Tour - johndcook.com

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Knight’s Tour – Numberphile (YouTube)
Knight’s Tour - bradfieldcs.com

Fun with Graphs

Chessboard Graph - Desmos

Chess.com was used to visualise some of the various problems on the board

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