VBA – Knight’s tour algorithm with Excel

Wikipedia says the following for the Knight’s tour :

A knight’s tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square only once. If the knight ends on a square that is one knight’s move from the beginning square (so that it could tour the board again immediately, following the same path), the tour is closed, otherwise it is open.

I have decided to try to simulate the Knight’s tour with Excel. Something like this was achieved after some time:

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So, what do we have? A VBA code, in which we give the size of the matrix. The minimum matrix is 5×5, the maximum is Excel width x Excel width. 🙂

Once we give it, the algorithm, using the Warnsdorf’s rule start working. The rule is in short like this – the knight should go into the position, from which we have the less possible positions to go next. I don’t know about you, but this really sounded like a recursion to me, so I have implemented it. The recursion sub-routine in my code is named “CalculatePriceWithItalic”, because initially I was using italic font to note where my knight has already stepped. From the pictures above, you understand that you start with 1, then the knight goes to 2, then 3, then 4 and etc. The red square is the square of the current position of the knight. It is red, just to make the animation.

Long story short – here comes the code. If you want to run it, simply write “Main” in the immediate window. To change the matrix size, change the value of l_counter in the main function. If you do not want animation (why would you not want animation) you may set the value of b_animate to false:

The code and the file are available in GitHub here!

Enjoy! 😀

 

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