Knight’s Tours on Rectangular Chessboards Using External Squares

Abstract

The classic puzzle of finding a closed knight’s tour on a chessboard consists of moving a knight from square to square in such a way that it lands on every square once and returns to its starting point. The 8 × 8 chessboard can easily be extended to rectangular boards, and in 1991, A. Schwenk characterized all rectangular boards that have a closed knight’s tour. More recently, Demaio and Hippchen investigated the impossible boards and determined the fewest number of squares that must be removed from a rectangular board so that the remaining board has a closed knight’s tour. In this paper we define an extended closed knight’s tour for a rectangular chessboard as a closed knight’s tour that includes all squares of the board and possibly additional squares beyond the boundaries of the board and answer the following question: how many squares must be added to a rectangular chessboard so that the new board has a closed knight’s tour?