In this video, I show a fun puzzle that was brought to light by @GMBenjaminFinegold. The puzzle involves moving the knight to every unprotected square on the board.
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#chess #ericrosen
It would take me forever to do that.
First time I did it, it took me 7:17…. it was a long time.
Squeen 🙂
I did it before watching and I got 9:41. I play lots of ultrabullet and variant chess, so haven't tried to improve my real chess rating in a while, but I've been playing for 3 and a half years. I ended up thinking that it was forced to go a long way around for some of the squares on the left side of the board, but once I watched the video I was impressed with how Eric kept finding much more optimal paths. I might give it another go now and I bet I can get a significantly faster time.
EDIT: Got 6:26 on the next go around.
Had 7:30 ish the first time and by the 4th time I had it down to 3:30, proud af
I proudly did it in 21 minutes
7:02 on first try before watching the vid (~2100 lichess). it was super fun!
I tried this before watching the video. The speed that he got to c8 made me rethink everything I know about chess..
I play f3 just to spite Ben feingold.
Whenever I think I’m good at chess I watch Eric play a puzzle just to remember I’ll never really know how to play this game.
For anyone wondering the minimum number of moves is 158. Queen being at d5 makes the game as difficult as possible without making it impossible. In fact only 36/64 queen positions are even possible to complete, with a1/h8 being the easiest with 118 moves, and d5/e4 being the most difficult with 158. With queen at d5 the longest transition is going from c8 to b8 with 9 moves. This is also the longest transition among all solvable queen positions. However, with queen at d6, even though the puzzle isn't actually solvable, going from e8 to c8 requires 10 moves. Oh also, it took me about 15 minutes to solve the puzzle, and another 100 more to write enough code to find all these fun facts. Thanks for the cool puzzle!
10 minutes 11 seconds
Just take the squeen
My first try was 20 minutes, second was 10 minutes.
Part of the original puzzle is moving to the correct squares, and blundering should end it, so this website makes it considerably easier. It’s impressive how hard this is even for an IM.
I got 10 minutes on mobile before watching it
Oof, this video needs a warning.
Expecting Erics voice, and having to listen to the other dude instead is extremely violent
You’re going to break that poor horses ankles 😬
done in 25 mins ;-;
The amount of time Eric takes to move the knight from one square to other, I need that time to find the square where we have to move the knight
it took me 10 minutes to get the first two ranks done, so about 40 minutes to complete the whole thing…. 🙂
My first attempt took me 21:45, and that was before watching the video. After watching, I got it down to 9:58 the second try
3:07 in my first try– eric is so fast. It was a really fun exercise!
At some point I thought we were still on b7 but we were already 3 past that lol
Man wow so much adrenaline, i did it in 2:48
10 min, 4 sec. first try; I could probably lessen it a few minutes with practice, but 3 minute range is amazing!
I got 16:38 as a 1000 in chess
my score is: 19:31
Wow, that was a nice challenge.
28:57.
I got 21:45 I belong in 500
This would've probably taken me hours.. And that's a little demoralizing😐
12:09
10:00 exactly for me; some of these squares were definetly more difficult to reach than others
Me checking if I have left playback speed at 2x
I got it in 9:07 before watching, I can imagine losing a couple minutes but not down to 3
I got it in 9:07 before watching, I can imagine losing a couple minutes but not down to 3
I got 8:21, seems IMs are almost three times faster with knight moves than 1600 rated players..
dude takes less than 10% of the time it took me. "this can be frustrating" ok, boss.
1500 and it took me 15 minutes
Lichess 1900 here. 9.12 first try, 4.06 second. Then watched your video, you're fucking amazing aha
I did it in less than 2 minutes…
… then I gave up.
That was insanely impressive!
just spent 5 minutes to get from the start to b8
I used backtracking, tracking backwards from the square I wanted to go to. I was eliminating illegal squares. I only backtracked till I could see how my night could get to the closest knight could reach the closest square backtracked.
I think the queen should take the knight instantly when you screw up and display a PLAY AGAIN? button.
18:34
800 elo, first attempt took 19 mins, but was able to get it down to 8 mins by the 3rd attempt. The way i lost so much time, was on the first attempt my strategy was to just wing it and move the pieces and hope i get it, which didn't go so well. The other attempts my strategy was to work backwards, figure out the entire path, and do it all in one go, but i kept forgetting the path as i was doing it, and had to repath the same thing like 4 times before it stuck. Thought this might be interesting to share as a baseline for how a beginner performs.
I think it would be more interesting in doing it in the least moves possible instead of as fast as possible.
I could maybe do it under 3 also. (hours of course)
took me double the time to get half of the moves. lost patience. great minigame tho. thx for sharing!