Trapped Knights and other (Fairy) Chess Pieces

Abigail - — 45 minutes

We'll investigate what chess pieces get trapped when moved under certain rules.

Earlier this year, Numberphile presented a video with Neil Sloane talking about a Knight moving on an infinite chess board under certain rules. Eventually, the Knight gets trapped (not being to move using the given rules). The video ends with a "you can do this with other chess pieces as well".

So, we took up the challenge, and wrote some code to investigate. Other common chess pieces behave pretty boringly, but there are a myriad of other chess variants and even more "fairy" chess piece. We will explore the behaviour of other pieces, and we'll play around with fiddling the starting conditions.



Target audience
Any
Talk duration
45 minutes
Talk status
cancelled