Tuesday, 10 March 2026

Bimagic Queen's Tours and a Semi-Trimagic Queen's Tour on a 16x16 Board

Preamble

Awani Kumar, a specialist of magic chess tours, and in particular the knight's tour, recently wrote an email to a magic square group that I belong to, with the following message:

"I have a humble request/suggestion. We have bimagic, trimagic and higher order magic squares but the bimagic knight tour has remained elusive.

Please look for bimagic knight tour on say, 32x32 or 64x64 (or larger boards). It need not be diagonally magic. Even a semi-bimagic tour -- only rows or columns but not both -- will be a milestone."

Bimagic Queen's Tours Research and Findings on a 16x16 Board

I had no bimagic knight's tours to propose, but Awani Kumar's request reminded me of research I once did on bimagic queen's tours, back in 2021 and 2022. I had then been hoping to find a diagonally bimagic queen's tour on the 16x16 board, but did not succeed. Dissatisfied, I had never published any of my findings, but after reading Awani's message I have now compiled these in the following PDF document entitled "Bimagic Queen's Tours and a Semi-Trimagic Queen's Tour on a 16 x 16 board" which can also be found at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SobJ0HOpMgTbe6eiA_k2-Cx8pBU2o6LI/view?usp=sharing:



A Single-Break Diagonally Bimagic Queen's Tour 

This single-break diagonally magic queen's tour was found on the 28th August, 2021, but has not been published until now. The single break occurs between the numbers 128 and 129, at exactly the half-way point between 1 and n² (where n = 16, and n² = 256).

Walkington's single-break diagonally bimagic queen's tour on a 16x16 board, approaches the elusive diagonally bimagic queen's tour!

Observations

I'm sure that break-free diagonally magic queen's tours exist on the 16 x 16 board. Should the subject be of interest to you, I look forward to reading about your findings!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Or, should you prefer to send a private message, please email william.walkington@wandoo.fr