Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Knight's Tour

Knight's Tour

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 3 Jun 2010 at 18:24:24 (UTC)

Original - An open knight's tour of a chessboard.

Alternative 1 - Faster, with shading of visited squares.

Alternative 2 - Shaded squares.

Reason: An extremely simple (23kb) animation that nevertheless illustrates the chess and mathematics concept of a Knight's tour.
Articles in which this image appears: Knight's tour
FP category for this image: Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Diagrams, drawings, and maps/Diagrams
Creator: Ilmari Karonen

Support as nominator --Spikebrennan (talk) 18:24, 25 May 2010 (UTC) and support alt 1 but not alt 2 (because the checkerboard pattern in alt 2 is more confusing than helpful) Spikebrennan (talk) 03:58, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Very interesting. High encyclopedic value to be sure. I could support if the color of the squares changed when the knight has reached them. As it is, it's not immediately clear when the tour has been completed. Jujutacular ^T · C 18:38, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking the same while watching it before i read the comments. Also i'd prefer it to go a bit faster. Qwfp (talk) 21:36, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

~~Oppose~~ Support Alt - squares should be color-coded for status and the animation needs to be faster. Kaldari (talk) 22:12, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed that this has great potential, but I agree that we need some sort of colouration. For a start, it would be good if there was a white/black divide, and, secondly, it would be nice if there was some way of differentiating between visited squares and squares at which the knight is yet to arrive. J Milburn (talk) 23:36, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. By the end of the tour the board is getting rather crowded. It would be nice if there were some way to more easily determine which steps were new. Here's an idea: Give the path a border. Newer parts of the path should draw over older parts. Then it will be clearer what happened when. (I would also like to echo others' comments on coloration. It would be nice if the chessboard squares traditionally colored white and the chessboard squares traditionally colored black were differentiated, and it would be nice if the squares that have already been visited were colored. And it should be faster.). Ozob (talk) 02:42, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: The speed and the coloring are issues but even if they were fixed this image wouldn't say FP to me. It illustrates the concept but it's not particularly eye-catching or artistic. Mathematics is often not a very visual subject. When it is you can get stunning images but this doesn't seem to be one of those cases.--RDBury (talk) 15:27, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Per Spikebrennan's request on my talk page and the comments above, I've prepared an alternative version with shading of visited squares and with twice the speed of the original. Also, now that GIF scaling works again, I've rendered the new version twice as large as the original (which still leaves it under the 12.5Mpx limit). I've also updated the Perl source to match the version used to generate this new version. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:17, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support ALT I knew that adding color would make the animation clearer, but wow, it is extremely revealing of the pattern. Most interesting is the formation achieved precisely halfway through the tour. Jujutacular ^T · C 17:39, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Support either alts, prefer alt 1. Jujutacular ^T · C 02:06, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support Alt only. Without question excellent. Cowtowner (talk) 03:07, 27 May 2010 (UTC) (was not logged in at the time)[reply]
Support Alternative 1, Neutral on Alternative 2. Well executed, informative animation. NauticaShad es 20:19, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Alternative 2 is too busy, in my opinion. NauticaShad es 18:37, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. This is better than the original, but I think it can be made better still.
1. The black and white squares should start out colored in their traditional manner; or better yet, colored similarly to File:Knights-Tour-Animation.gif. When a square has been visited, shade it, but preserve the underlying coloring. I think it would look good if you tinted visited squares blue.
2. The board still gets crowded by the end. As I said above, I think the solution to this is to put a border around the path so that the order in which the squares were visited is a bit more clear.
3. Replace the arrowhead with a picture of a knight. Ozob (talk) 00:12, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- It sounds like what you really want is File:Knights-Tour-Animation.gif, only with a larger board? That would not be hard to do. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:10, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  Almost, but not quite. File:Knights-Tour-Animation.gif does not display the path that the knight took, and I'd rather that the visited squares were tinted instead of having a ×. Ozob (talk) 02:15, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm even more pleased with Alt 2, now that it's up. I have some further comments, though:
Several other editors have commented that the picture looks "too busy" or "too confusing". I think I have an exegesis of that idea: When I looked at this picture on my iPhone, I thought that the light squares were pure white and the dark squares were pure black. Where the path crossed the dark squares, it was invisible. When I looked at this picture on a full-sized monitor, I was able to see that the dark squares are actually a deep brown, but they are still very dark. Because the color of the dark squares is so dark and the color of the light squares is so light, there is a tremendous amount of contrast in the picture.
If you do a Google image search for "chessboard", you turn up three different kinds. (1) Computer generated. These are usually pure black on pure white; sometimes they are gray on white or dark gray on light gray. (2) Photos of real chessboards. These are usually dark and light wood. (3) Exotic collectors' sets. Of these, I think the most visually pleasing (for our purposes) would be (2). Alt 2 is a variant of (1), whose colors I think are too visually chaotic to be comfortable with.
As before, I still do not like an unadorned black path, and I would still like it to have a border. With a slight border it would be easier to see it against the squares of the chessboard (no matter what color they are), and it would be possible to tell which moves came first and which last. I also still think it would be good to replace the arrowhead by a knight figure. Ozob (talk) 22:56, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose (for now) Having not read any of the above discussion, my initial reaction is that the colors of the squares should be checkered, black and white. After that, I can see the interesting nature of this concept and can support it, but only if it actually looks like a chess board to the mass public. upstate NYer 02:34, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Frankly I don't think you're giving the 'mass public' enough credit. The article in question is about a relatively advanced mathematical problem, after all, so I think it's overwhelmingly likely the reader will recognize the grid as a chessboard. NauticaShad es 10:17, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think a closed tour (i.e. knight returns to starting square) would be more interesting --118.139.11.47 (talk) 23:23, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support alt. Excellent animation of the concept. For the purpose of this illustration, actual square color isn't really significant. It's worthwhile to use white and gray to designate which squares have been visited. Durova⁴¹² 23:43, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
None of the additional decoration is necessary; not even shading the visited squares is necessary. The question is, how can the information be presented in the most useful and beautiful way possible? For that I think the square color is significant: Not only does it help observers relate the diagram to actual chessboards, but it will help them to see that the knight must switch from a dark square to a light one or vice versa at every step (which is an important fact for the mathematical study of knight's tours). I think that this picture has got a lot of potential, and I hope to see a revised version soon. Ozob (talk) 02:56, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Every possible move a knight can make will switch from dark to light or vice versa, that's not a specific aspect of the knight's tour. Jujutacular ^T · C 03:52, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but this fact is particularly important for the existence of a knight's tour; see the article. Ozob (talk) 20:59, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support alternative 1. Alternative 2 shows light/dark squares with a red tint for visited tiles. Personally I find it version too confusing to support - there's just too much information to take in at once. Time3000 (talk) 18:08, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support alt1, weak support alt2, neutral original. Have fun, closer. J Milburn (talk) 11:01, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support Alt 1, weak support original - these show the concept well. Oppose Alt 2 - the colour of the squares is unnecessary information, and makes it harder to see what's going on. Ephemeronium (talk) 12:17, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Knight's tour anim 2.gif --Makeemlighter (talk) 01:46, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]