Dan Thomasson
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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.
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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.
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10x10 Perec's Knight's Tour
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10x10 Perec's Knight's Tour corrected by Dan Thomasson
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