Georges Perec's 10x10 Knight's Tour
The following 10x10 Knight's Tour was used by Georges Perec to describe the rooms of a Paris apartment building in his masterpiece: Life: A User's Manual. Steve Hodges included a copy of the tour in his thesis: "Revealing Code: What Can Language Teach Software?" on page 58.
Steve also extracts the following quote from page 172 of Oulipo Compendium (a book by Harry Mathews, Alastair Brotchie, and Raymond Queneau, Atlas Archive 6. London: Atlas Press, 1998), referring to Perec's explanation of using a 10x10 Knight's tour: "it would have been tedious to describe the building floor by floor and apartment by apartment; but that was no reason to leave the chapter sequence to chance. So I decided to use a principle derived from an old problem well known to chess enthusiasts as the Knight's tour; it requires moving a knight around the 64 squares of a chess-board without its ever landing more than once on the same square...
For the special case of Life A User's Manual, a solution for a 10 x 10 chess-board had to be found... The division of the book into six parts was derived from the same principle: each time the knight has finished touching all four sides of the square, a new section begins."
I reproduced Perec's 10x10 Knight's Tour below on Perec's Knight's Tour image. Notice that the tour is not accurate, because of the incorrect knight move between squares 65 and 66. A more accurate Knight's Tour can be seen below in the 10x10 Perec's Knight's Tour corrected by Dan Thomasson.
For the special case of Life A User's Manual, a solution for a 10 x 10 chess-board had to be found... The division of the book into six parts was derived from the same principle: each time the knight has finished touching all four sides of the square, a new section begins."
I reproduced Perec's 10x10 Knight's Tour below on Perec's Knight's Tour image. Notice that the tour is not accurate, because of the incorrect knight move between squares 65 and 66. A more accurate Knight's Tour can be seen below in the 10x10 Perec's Knight's Tour corrected by Dan Thomasson.