Knight's Tour Puzzle

This is a puzzle I made years ago for a Scottish Correspondence Chess Magazine - it is a knight's tour (where knight has to touch each square once only and then on to the next with legal knight moves) but it also spells a message.  The clues I will give:  start at what would be d1 on a chessboard (THE LETTER IS A), it forms a question and the word structure is (3/3/4/7/5/5/7/2/2/2/10/6/8).  It is so long since I devised it I had to work it out from scratch again myself; why did I never think to save the answers to these things...?

O     T     Z     I      J     E     E     I

Z     N     U     H     L     S     U     R

G     Y     K     N     E     G     T     S

G     U     S     A     G     E     E     S

E     N     H     N     D     M    O     C

P      I     N     T     T      I     T     D

I      R     P     S      I      I      A     R

T     G     T     A     R      I     O     S

i didnt at all understand what u had written ........???

iam sorry

Anyone trying this?  If there is interest let me know how far you get....I could post the solution after a period of time if you like.

 okay, imagine the letters on a chessboard - there are 64 - then jump a knight from d1 all round the board touching each square once and once only till message spelt out

O5     T     Z     I      J7     E     E     I

Z     N     U6     H     L     S     U8     R

G     Y4     K     N     E     G     T     S

G     U     S     A     G     E     E     S9

E3     N     H     N     D     M    O     C

P      I     N     T     T      I     T10     D

I      R2     P     S      I      I      A     R

T     G     T     A1     R      I     O     S

Are you just...

Well, that's as far as I can go right now. Not sure if the third word's right though...

Perfect so far.  Worth noting though that there are only 2 squares that can reach each corner so theres a way in and a way out.

Neato!

Are you just sitting there doing puzzles or is it practising Knight endgames

wowzer that was fast WELL DONE!

EDIT: Whoops, someone already did it...

 er...feel free to check his answer? 

What can I say? I be awesome. 

Knight's tours are a hobby of mine and my literacy skills are excellent, so between the two of them the pattern recognition wasn't too hard. But I'd have used a different tour based on a method I evolved some years back, so it didn't give me that much of an advantage. Fun puzzle, thanks very much. 

I know there are systems for making them but that was my own one from years ago so I stuck with it.  What I would like to see is a CLOSED tour where knight finishes on same square.

Here we are:

03  54  21  40  15  58  17  42
22  39  02  55  20  41  14  59
53  04  37  24  57  16  43  18
38  23  56  01  44  19  60  13
05  52  25  36  09  64  31  46 
26  35  08  49  32  45  12  61
51  06  33  28  63  10  47  30
34  27  50  07  48  29  62  11

... a re-entrant Knight's Tour.

My system: Divide the board into 4x4 quadrants. A knight can't tour on a 4x4 board (prove it in your own time!) but it can execute one of these two patterns:

XOOO
OOXO
OXOO
OOOX

or

OXOO
OOOX
XOOO
OOXO

or their reflections. After executing one of these, begin another such pattern in an adjacent quadrant, starting carefully so as to leave the Knight an exit at the end of the pattern. With a little practice you can start stringing these patterns together to create complete tours, and after that, the world's your oyster.  

Gil-Gandel that is really awesome.  I had always wanted to see one.  First time I heard of knight tours I think was in the novel The Eight by Katherine Neville and she mentioned mathematical closed tours....it led on to my developing my relatively dumbed down one but always wondering.  My eyes are opened.

Glad to oblige, and lang may yer lum reek 

Thats pretty impressive.  I feel totally amateur now. Not that I didnt know that way better minds than mine had worked on the tours.  Most of all, though, I am delighted that you guys have posted this stuff - it means I can always access it from my home page.  Thanks, guys.

Another pattern that I used to try resulting in a quasi-symmetrical tour: As stated, a Knight can't tour on a 4x4 board, but it can if you cut off two opposite-coloured corners. So consider the centre of the board - c-file to f-file, 3rd rank to 6th. Leave out c3 and f3. The idea is to begin somewhere in the outer ring which comprises 50 squares, and visit 25 of them, so that the 25 squares you have visited and the 25 you haven't are mirror images. The 26th square you visit should be d3 or e3 depending what colour square you started on. You then tour the 14-square inner zone, leaving e3 or d3 (whichever one you didn't enter by) until last. It then follows that your last 25 moves will be mirror images of the first 25.

Alternatively, if you have some knowledge of programming, you can code this up:

1) Define a board as an 8x8 array. For each square store two values: Accessibility, meaning the number of squares that are a Knight's move away (2 for a corner square, 8 for a centre, somewhere in between for others) and Remoteness, the distance of the square from the centre (the number of 1-square orthogonal moves you would have to make to reach d4, d5, e4 or e5, whichever's nearest). Starting at any square, you repeatedly do the following:

a) Reduce the "accessibility" of any square within range by 1, as your present position has just made it harder to get to.

b) Set the "accessibility" of your current square to -1 as it is forever inaccessible after you have left it.

c) Move from your current square to the least accessible square that still has > 0 accessibility; in the case of a tie, move to the one with the highest remoteness.

...until you have visited all 64 squares.

Any bugs in this algorithm are left as an exercise for the advanced student. 

rofl - man you are out there.  my tecnique is largely based on "horsey go 1-2-3"

Yeah, but it takes freakin' forever to hit on a Knight's tour that way.