Closed knight’s tour problem on some (m,n,k,1)-rectangular tubes

A closed knight’s tour of a normal two-dimensional chessboard by using legal moves of the knight has been generalized in several ways. One way is to consider a closed knight’s tour on a ringboard of width [Formula: see text], which is the [Formula: see text] chessboard with the middle part missing and the rim contains [Formula: see text] rows and [Formula: see text] columns. Another way is to stack [Formula: see text] copies of the [Formula: see text] chessboard to construct an [Formula: see text] rectangular chessboard and the closed knight’s tour can be on the surface or within the [Formula: see text] rectangular chessboard. This paper combines these two ideas by stacking [Formula: see text] copies of [Formula: see text] ringboard of width [Formula: see text], which we call the [Formula: see text]-rectangular tube. We explore the existence and the nonexistence of closed knight’s tours for [Formula: see text]-tube and [Formula: see text]-tube.

Closed Knight’s Tours on (m,n,r)-Ringboards

A (legal) knight’s move is the result of moving the knight two squares horizontally or vertically on the board and then turning and moving one square in the perpendicular direction. A closed knight’s tour is a knight’s move that visits every square on a given chessboard exactly once and returns to its start square. A closed knight’s tour and its variations are studied widely over the rectangular chessboard or a three-dimensional rectangular box. For m,n>2r, an (m,n,r)-ringboard or (m,n,r)-annulus-board is defined to be an m×n chessboard with the middle part missing and the rim contains r rows and r columns. In this paper, we obtain that a (m,n,r)-ringboard with m,n≥3 and m,n>2r has a closed knight’s tour if and only if (a) m=n=3 and r=1 or (b) m,n≥7 and r≥3. If a closed knight’s tour on an (m,n,r)-ringboard exists, then it has symmetries along two diagonals.