Black and White

van dehn chess puzzle

A remarkable thematic chess puzzle by Bodo Van Dehn, 1951. White to move and win.

The solution is 10 moves long, but all Black’s moves are forced. (That’s a very valuable hint.)

Click for Answer

A Flea’s Journey

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Euclid_Tetrahedron_4.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

A flea sits on one vertex of a regular tetrahedron. He hops continually from one vertex to another, resting for a minute between hops and choosing vertices without bias. Prove that, counting the first hop, we’d expect him to return to his starting point after four hops.

Click for Answer

The Magic Total

magic total

Each of the 36 numbers in this table is the sum of the numbers at the head of its column and at the left of its row. For example, 3 = 2 + 1 and 13 = 5 + 8. The six bold numbers have been chosen so that each of them falls in a different row and a different column. The underlined numbers were chosen in the same way. But each of these two sextets produces the same total: 16 + 6 + 5 + 14 + 8 + 8 = 8 + 10 + 7 + 8 + 10 + 14 = 57. In fact, any six numbers chosen in this way will produce the total 57. Why is this?

Click for Answer

Home Again

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Knights_tour_solution_Warnsdorff.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

On a regular 8 × 8 chessboard, a wandering knight can visit each square once and then return to his starting square. Show that he can’t do this on an m × n board if m and n are both odd.

Click for Answer

“A Chess Packing Problem”

In 2006 Martin Gardner asked: Can you arrange the 16 non-pawn pieces in a standard chess set on a 5 × 5 board so that no piece attacks a piece of the opposite color? As in a conventional game, the two bishops of each color must stand on squares of opposite colors.

Click for Answer

The Dark Half

A puzzle from the 1997 Ukrainian Mathematical Olympiad:

Cells of some rectangular board are coloured as chessboard cells. In each cell an integer is written. It is known that the sum of the numbers in each row is even and the sum of numbers in each column is even. Prove that the sum of all numbers in the black cells is even.

Click for Answer