T. R. Dawson70th death anniversary
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Article by Awani Kumar - Lucknow, India
Thomas Rayner Dawson (born 28 November 1889) was an English chess problemist, columnist and editor. He invented many fairy pieces and fairy chess ideas in addition to conventional chess compositions and thus widely acknowledged as “the father of Fairy Chess”. His chess problem compositions (from 1907 when he was 18 to his death in 1951) include 5,320 fairies, 885 directmates, 97 selfmates, and 138 endings. This amounts to composing on an average two to three problems a week. 120 of his problems have been awarded prizes and 211 honourably mentioned or otherwise commended. Dawson passed away on December 16, 1951 and the author wishes to commemorate his 70th death anniversary with interesting tours of knight on 7x10 (= 70) and 12x16 (which corresponds to December 16) boards. Readers of Problemas are well aware of the millennium old knight tour puzzle – moving a knight on an empty board so that it visits all the cells only once. Figure 1 is a semi-magic tour of knight on 7x10 board. Here sum of all the rows is 355. There are unequal number of odd and even cells along the columns, thus columns can’t have magic sum. It is a 5-fold cyclic semi-magic tour. That is, if the tour starts from any of the cells 8, 29, 36, 43 or 64 as 1 and moves sequentially along the knight path then it remains a semi-magic tour. Such tours are very rare.
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