On the Crazy Knight's Tour Problem

Abstract: Heffter arrays are partially filled arrays that have been introduced in [1] as a tool to construct regular embeddings of graphs on surfaces. These constructions can be achieved from the solution of a tour problem on the filled cells of the array, introduced in [3] and called Crazy Knight's Tour Problem. In particular, the knight's move is seen as the composition of an horizontal move and a vertical one, where the directions (leftward or rightward, upward or downward respectively) are prescribed in advance for each row and each column of the array and each filled cell is mapped to the first filled cell encountered along that direction. Then, a solution to the Crazy Knight's Tour Problem is a set of directions such that the resulting move function is a tour over the array. Here, we consider a particular class of square arrays, and we construct solutions to the tour problem in some infinite families of these arrays.