Now that you've learned how to move through quadrants and break up patterns effectively, let's practice and play an actual game!

Certainly you can play here, here, or here, or even on a regular board.

One of my favorite versions was Petri Kallberg's Knight's Tour 1.0 Dashboard widget (Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later required). I did, however, have a few criticisms of the widget. Instead of just sending off my criticisms, however, I decided to improve the widget myself.

The first thing that struck me about the widget was that all the squares were black. Not only was I used to a real chessboard with black and white squares, but the advanced version I teach requires that you know which squares and black and which are white. Naturally, that was the first change.

In the original widget, the black squares hadn't been visited, and the white squares had been. The second change, then, was to add a new color for visited squares, for which I chose a deep blue.

The original version also featured a great concept, that of showing the valid moves from your current square. I liked this, but I also wanted to be able to demonstrate the Knight's Tour without this feature. I decided to make it an option. There is now a Valid Moves? checkbox on the back. When the widget is loaded or restarted, this will default to off, but can be activated on the back of the widget, and it will take immediate effect. As in the original version, the valid moves will show up as grey squares.

Also, I've added messages for two particular situations. The first, of course, is when you complete the Knight's Tour, where you get congratulations. The other message appears when you leave yourself without any moves. It notifies you that you're trapped, and tells you to restart.

The result is my Knight's Tour 2.0 Dashboard widget (Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later required), which is downloadable at that link, or via the Download section in the rightmost column for free. Here is a screenshot of this new version (shown with the Valid Moves option on):

If you're a Mac user, try it out, and let me know how you like it!

Regular readers will expect my next post to be around noon on Sunday. However, I'll be posting very early Monday morning instead. Why the unusual posting time? You'll have to wait and find out.