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.