Knight Moves
Time limit1sMemory limit128 MB
For each pair of squares, find the minimum number of knight moves between them on a standard 8 by 8 chessboard.
- Level
Medium4 of 10
- Topics
- BFS, Graph, Shortest path
- Solved
- No attempts yet
Problem
A friend of yours is doing research on the Traveling Knight Problem (TKP), where you must find the shortest closed tour of knight moves that visits each square of a given set of squares on a chessboard exactly once. He thinks that the most difficult part of the problem is determining the smallest number of knight moves between two given squares, and that once you have accomplished this, finding the tour would be easy.
Of course, you know that it is the other way around. So you offer to write a program that solves the "difficult" part for him.
Your job is to write a program that takes two squares and as input and then determines the number of knight moves on a shortest route from to .
Input
The input contains one or more test cases. Each test case consists of one line containing two squares separated by a single space. A square is a string consisting of a letter (a–h) representing the column and a digit (1–8) representing the row on the chessboard. Input continues until end of file.
Output
For each test case, print one line saying "To get from xx to yy takes n knight moves.", where xx is the starting square, yy is the target square, and n is the minimum number of knight moves. The output string is fixed English and must be printed exactly as shown.