Questions tagged [checkerboard]

A puzzle involving checkerboards: grids of squares alternating black and white in color, most commonly an 8x8 board.

A checkerboard is a grid of squares with alternating black and white colors, most commonly an 8x8 board but not necessarily even rectangular.

Many checkerboard puzzles concern the adjacency relations between squares:

  • Two squares are said to be horizontally or vertically adjacent (sometimes also called orthogonally adjacent or strongly adjacent), if they share a common edge. Every corner/boundary/interior square has 2/3/4 horizontally or vertically adjacent neighbors.

  • Two squares are said to be weakly adjacent (sometimes also called King-adjacent), if they share a common edge or a common point. Every square has at most eight weakly adjacent neighbors.

Example: The mutilated chessboard problem considers a standard 8x8 chessboard that has two diagonally opposite corners removed (hence leaving 62 squares). Is it possible to place 31 dominoes of size 2x1 so as to cover all of these squares?

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Chessboard Rook Problem

Let's say that you have a chessboard (they are 8x8 spaces) with a rook on it (only moves horizontally & vertically). You can put walls horizontally or vertically between the spaces. If the rook can get to every possible space on the chessboard…
user41716
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Painting a chessboard

On the following chessboard every white square meets at least two red squares. Let's paint a new chessboard so that every white square meets exactly two red square. Every square should be painted either red or white. It is clearly possible from the…
P.-S. Park
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Coloring of a 5 x 5 chessboard

The squares of a 5 x 5 chessboard are painted in one of two colors in an arbitrary way. Prove that there exist 2 rows and 2 columns such that the 4 squares where they intersect are all of the same color. This puzzle came from a Leningrad…
Will Octagon Gibson
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Moving a pawn around on a chessboard

Suppose you have a checkerboard with two opposite corner squares removed, like this: Can you move a pawn on the board only horizontally and vertically, one square at a time, and have it touch every square exactly once?
user88
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Is it possible to pack the tetrominoes exactly on the checkboard?

I have this as an exercise but I'm not sure what's the best way to approach it. I've tried the pack them but wasn't able to do so. I see that having them combined will yield in 10 whites and 10 blacks ( because every piece will cover 2 blacks and 2…
user42293
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8 queens equivalent on checkers

I'm a computer programmer trainer and sometimes I do some puzzle exercises with my students. Right now we did a checkers game and I would like to make them program to solve something with their checkers board. Do you know any interesting puzzle?