Multi-storey car park

 It seems the new building by the bus station is to be a multi-storey car park! I would have thought that another car park is the last thing Crewe needs. Or does it mean all the other car parks on the other side of Delamere street will be closed - and maybe built on or landscaped into gardens? I doubt it. 

More Road Works in Crewe

 Here are some more recent photos of the works in Barnard Street, and at the end of Delamere Street where it meets Flag Lane and in the town centre.

I'm not sure what the building is by the crane in the town centre but hope it is just a temporary structure and not an example of the new architecture to be built there!

Solutions to Tour Puzzles

I've published a set of tour puzzles on the Knight and Leaper Tours subforum. Moves at the top of the 6x7 board (Diagonal, Lateral or Right angles) are given and the puzzle in each case is to complete a symmetric closed tour. 

Knight and Leaper Tours - ChessProblem.net

To avoid having the solutions on the same page I thought it might be better to publish them here and provide a link to this page, to allow time for people to solve the puzzles.

The solutions can all be reasoned out step by step. For instance the paths through the corner cells are fixed, and in most cases this is true of other cells. Another factor to watch for is where putting in a pair of opposite moves (to satisfy the symmetry condition) results in a short circuit (i.e. not a complete tour).

Chess at Great Yarmouth

 On Friday 31 March I took to the trains to Great Yarmouth, travelling via Nottingham and Norwich, to take part in the chess congress. This was probably a bit too far to travel in one day and left me quite tired. The bed and breakfast accommodation I had booked was comfortable however.

The weather on Saturday was wet and windy and cold, and getting to the Conference Centre venue, at the race course, was a long walk. Nevertheless I began with a good win against a 1500 rated opponent. This was followed by a draw. I was unable to find a place nearby for a decent meal and had to settle for a take-away coffee and pasty. 

By the time of the third round that evening I was quite tired and found I had to play a strong Junior. Unfortunately she kept coughing at every move, which I complained about to the organisers, and questioned the state of her health, but they said she only had a cold, not Covid. It was a long game and in the end I ran out of time.

On Sunday morning the weather was much better, sunny but still with a strong wind. I lost my morning game by playing all the wrong opening moves. Fortunately this gave me time to catch a No.8 bus into the town centre where I was able to get some cod and chips at the Fish O'Licious by the bus station. Surprisingly for a seaside town there didn't seem to be many fish and chip shops, but maybe it was out of season. Most places along the front were closed up.

I caught the bus back to the venue, arriving in good time, and in a good mood, to win the final game, also against a 1500 rated player, though I think he was very tired at the end. 

So my score was 2.5 out of 5, which I consider my standard result. The chess results website rates my performance at the 1460 level, well above my current rating of 1311. 

The journey home was uneventful but I needed a good sleep that night. I will have to look at the chess calendar to see whether there is another event I could enter before the Crewe congress at the end of June. Maybe I should try some rapid play. 

Crewe Town Centre

 Here is a photo I took of the latest works in the town centre where the bus station used to be. 

It is beginning to be possible to see across the whole area, were it not for the piles of rubble in between.

Subforum on Tours

 Alexander George who runs the ChessProblem.com forum has kindly allowed me to set up a subforum in the Mathematical Problems section for discussion of Knight and Leaper Tours. 

Guenter Stertenbrink is also involved as a Moderator, under the user name gsgs. 

Link Knight and Leaper Tours - ChessProblem.net

There is already a column of topics, many relating to magic tours. Some of the posts from GS are rather mathematical and technical, concerning computer programming. 

I hope this will continue to serve as a forum for knight and leaper tours and related subjects when I have gone. It will be in place of my current email exchanges with a wide range of correspondents.

Blackpool Chess

I took the train to Blackpool for the chess congress on Friday 10 February. The train I was due to catch was however cancelled due to a fatality on the line. I was directed onto the Glasgow train, which was diverted via Manchester to stop at Preston, to get a connection to Blackpool. 

The Hotel where I stayed, really a B&B, was halfway between the station and the chess venue. I was the only client there, and was put in the room decorated with an Egypt theme, other rooms still being prepared for the coming season. The lack of hot water in the tap was a problem I've encountered before in hotels, but the full English breakfast was OK, and the landlady was a genial conversationalist.

The chess congress (or 'Conference' as it is officially known) was at the Imperial Hotel. Some photos I took of the playing areas have come out very blurred, so I can only show an external view.

My final score was only 1.5 out of 5, consisting of a win, a draw, and three losses. Of these the losses were the longest and most interesting games. Two of the losses were against young women and went to over 70 moves with only kings and pawns on the board at the end. The win on Sunday morning was a surprisingly quick game of only 15 moves against a stronger graded man. 

This is the first time I have travelled any distance for three years, and may have reinforced my confidence to travel more later this year, preferably when it is a bit warmer. Walking around Blackpool in the cold wind, when most of the attractions are closed was not particularly pleasant, but I did get some good fish and chips. 

Beautiful Crewe

 On Thursday 2 February I took a walk through Valley Park from Flag Lane to Walthall Street, and noticed that the Brook was full of discarded supermarket trolleys. I did the same walk on Sunday 5 February and they were still there. I took the following photos, and others, which I posted on Twitter under the title of #BeautifulCrewe. 

The old ten-pin bowling hall which has been closed since I moved here in 2019 has been reopened, alongside the Odeon, as shown in this further photo.

Road Closed

 There was more snow overnight and in the morning on the 18-19th, but it thawed again quite quickly. 

Delamere Street is closed to traffic at the end, where it meets Flag Lane, though cars were still driving through ignoring the signs last night and today. It looks as though work will be going ahead on the section of road through to Harrison Drive and Dunwoody Way, that has been planned for some months. 

Snow, Chess and Knight Tours

 We had our first snow of the year last night, but by this afternoon it had all thawed, before I could take a photo to prove it. So I had no trouble getting out to Crewe Chess Club this evening, to play third board in an F-team match against Alsager, which I managed to win against a young opponent. 

I'm thinking of entering the Blackpool Chess event next month, but I'm not sure I fancy traipsing about the seafront in the icy wind, and the Hotel costs are getting higher, and there are still threats of rail strikes, which put me off entering the Hastings tournament earlier this month. 

Professor Knuth sent me an email that included a knight's tour sent to him for his birthday on January 10. This is a 10x10 tour of the type showing a queen on cell 85 (his age) and guarding all the cells with prime numbers, and various other features. I will put it in the Figured Tours page shortly. 

I've been spending an inordinate amount of time checking up on the 6x7 symmetric knight tours. There was an error in the 266 diagrams of the Sulian (axial symmetric) tours, and it took me quite a while to find the duplicate among them, since the total should be 265 according to Knuth. I did this by classifying them by geometrical properties like number of straight line moves. It turned out that tour 166 in the list was the same as 165. 

Similarly when I drew out diagrams for the Eulerian tours I found 262, which was one short. I had to try check most of the enumeration again before I found the missing one. Now I have to arrange them to appear on the corrected website pages, but I'm somewhat undecided on the best arrangement method. Probably I will group together those that have the same angles in the centre cells.

Here is a puzzle to solve based on the search. Complete the tour, given the four pairs of moves in the top corner-adjacent cells. I published this also in Mathstodon but it attracted no interest there. There are twelve such choices for the near-corner angles that have a unique solution.

Some cases have no solution. Others have up to 30 solutions, so this method of enumerating the tours does not provide a good way of classifying them.

New Bus Station Open

The new bus station began operation this weekend. There is obviously still a lot of work to be done on it. The old bus station has been closed off ready for demolition. The new arrangement is much more compact. There is one entry and one exit for buses. This means the buses coming from the south need to go round the houses to get to the entrance, but this may only be temporary. The buses have to reverse out of the bays which looks as if it could be awkward if there are other buses coming in from behind. Here are some photos I took. 

The first and fourth photos are from the Delamere street exit. The second and third are from the Victoria street entrance.

I took a number 31 bus up to Leighton Hospital, to see if I could get a box of catheters to keep me supplied over the next weekend as my order had not yet arrived. This was successful. The A&E building seems to have expanded considerably, into what used to be a large car park, since I was there last. Then I took a number 12 bus back to Crewe.